Customer Benefits
Cut to the chase
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“Before Juniper Square, fundraising took too much time. Multiple people had to be involved to help with data entry, which was not the best use of their time. Today we can do a lot more, faster. What once took weeks, now takes hours.”
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“We now get calls and emails from investors that say the investor portal is amazing and exactly what they were looking for. They tell us its leaps and bounds ahead of what we did before, especially in terms of reporting and access to information.”
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“We work with high net worth individuals, family offices, and institutions, both domestically and overseas. Our structure on certain deals can be complex, with layers of entities and different investors for each layer. Juniper Square makes it easier to track all that and stay on top of every investment for every investor.”
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Total capitalization of property acquired
$3B+
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Property acquired (sq ft / states)
7.5M / 30
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2022 new investment target
$1.5B+
Customer Overview
Southern California-based private equity firm IRA Capital (IRA) got its start in 2010 with a $100 million closed-end fund. IRA’s investors, which originally included a close circle of friends and family, now includes a mix of pension funds, institutions, family offices, and high net worth individuals. IRA’s investments in venture capital and private equity span various industry segments, including technology, consumer/retail, healthcare, entertainment/media, and hedge funds/financial services.
The Challenge
Before Juniper Square, IRA used a tool called Onehub to store and share documents. It didn’t offer much in terms of tracking and reporting on investments, which was challenging, said Principal Amer Malas. “We would create reports and then an investor would ask for something different, so we were constantly putting data back into Excel and trying to reformat our reports in a way that would work for all investors.”
Malas says the fundraising process was equally challenging. “When we would fundraise, we had certain investors who expected documents to be prefilled. As a result, we would have to modify PDF documents. In some instances, we had 75-plus investors in a single deal, so you can imagine how time consuming it was to prefill all those documents manually. It was very tedious.”
The Process
IRA spent many months looking for a software solution that would make their day-to-day work more efficient. They met with several providers, but couldn’t find the right solution to meet all their needs. Malas explains, “None of the solutions we looked at had that special sauce that sold us. We even talked to one of the biggest players in the private equity space, but their technology seemed dated. They promised us they were refreshing it, but we never got a clear timeline of when those updates would happen.”
Eventually Amer came across Juniper Square. “I was doing an online search for investor portals to see what solutions were available, found Juniper Square, and requested a demo. After that meeting, I realized Juniper Square was the perfect fit for IRA Capital.”
“It was an easy decision because Juniper Square really was everything we were looking for,” Malas says. “The investor portal was impressive. It was also clear that we would be able to track and process distributions seamlessly with just a few clicks.”
“I think what really sold me on Juniper Square was its fundraising solution,” Amer says. “The integration with DocuSign was another big selling point as was the ability to process payments directly through the system. Before Juniper Square, our payment process was extremely manual and took up too much time. Our accountant had to print, sign, and mail checks for every single investor, so we had been looking for ways to slash the time needed to process payments. Once we found out that Juniper Square had that ability, it was a no brainer.”
Juniper Square gives me more time to execute on our strategy and business plan for each investment.
Amer Malas
Principal
The Results
“The implementation process was smooth and the Juniper Square customer success team was always ready to help,” Amer says. “We had to plug in data for several investment entities, thousands of investors and prospects, as well as distribution information. We also wanted to make sure that all the investments we had ever made, even if they were completed, were in the system. The entire process was easy and we were quickly up and fully operational in Juniper Square.”
“Early on, I had questions about how to do certain things and the team was always responsive,” Malas says. “Once I got more familiar with how the system works, I provided suggestions that ultimately made their way into the product enhancements, which I definitely appreciated.”
Today, IRA uses Juniper Square to monitor every single investor position, track and process distributions, house all investor documents, send out information on new offerings, and manage their fundraising process.
Even with all that, Malas says they are still not using all of Juniper Square’s capabilities. “Our rep follows up regularly to see how things are going, so I always ask if we’re using Juniper Square’s full potential. There is always more that Juniper Square is adding to help us run our business better. Right now, we’re making changes to our waterfall calculations, starting to use Juniper Square to track asset information, and we’re in talks about how we might be able to use Juniper Square’s fund administration services. I’ve also been pushing to take more advantage of Juniper Square’s data room functionality. We still put together some marketing materials in PowerPoint or PDFs. Given that we can easily upload videos and photos and documents to our data room, we no longer have to do that. It’s just one more redundancy that Juniper Square is helping us eliminate.”
“Juniper Square was the exact solution we were looking for. It meets all our requirements, and makes our work easier and more efficient. We‘re able to get things done in a shorter amount of time.”
Metrics as of 5/1/2022
