If the alternative asset industry makes good on its lofty goals of becoming a truly mainstream market, that may ultimately hinge on the ambitions of industry giants like InvestCloud and FNZ, and a seed-stage startup called Pluto.
This cohort of fintech companies is working in the trenches on new infrastructure designed to bring private market assets to a wider set of investors.
Among the largest players is InvestCloud, which develops a digital collaboration platform used by wealth advisers, brokerages and asset managers to blend private and public market investments in their client portfolios. Another is FNZ, which handles back-office portfolio management and provides other online support for registered investment advisers administering over $2 trillion in assets.
And on the scrappier, early-stage end of the market, there is Pluto, which offers a credit product for individual investors to manage liquidity needs in private market portfolios.
All three of these fintech specialty companies are on a mission to disrupt a fragmented corner of financial services as individual investors up their private market allocations and raise their profile in a channel previously reserved for big institutions.
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Something else also binds them together: Each is a portfolio company of Motive Partners, a multistage fintech investor betting heavily on the public-private convergence through a network of companies seeking to expand private market access on a large scale.
Backed by Apollo Global Management, New York-based Motive invests out of buyout and early-stage venture arms, each with its own funds totaling roughly $6.5 billion.
A global race is on among Wall Street firms, private banks and wealth managers to rewire their product mix with alternatives tailored to affluent investors and others. BlackRock is poised to roll out a suite of private funds aimed at the retail channel. Blackstone recently formed a unit anticipating more private options in 401(k) plans. And Apollo has teamed up with State Street to offer private-credit exposure to the masses.
Hands-on investor
To be sure, several global firms are backing the fintech buildout of the so-called alts-to-wealth ecosystem. But Motive may be the industry’s most hands-on investor by deploying its top partners to drive innovation at portfolio companies like FNZ, which is led by former JPMorgan executive Blythe Masters, and InvestCloud, headed by former Fiserv CEO Jeff Yabuki.
Motive’s strategic partnership with Apollo began in 2021, when Apollo took a 25% stake in the firm’s management company and invested in its buyout and VC funds. When Apollo announced that deal, CEO Marc Rowan said his firm was “well positioned to occupy the single best position in this evolving ecosystem.”
Since then, the two firms have co-invested in multiple companies, from seed stage to mature industry titans. Led by founder and managing partner Rob Heyvaert, Motive has continued to advise Apollo on all things fintech-related.
“We’re one of their most important go-to fintech partners,” Heyvaert said, adding, “I think it was the holistic view of Apollo that they felt that they needed to continue to be tech-savvy.”
Apollo declined to comment for this article.
Motive’s portfolio spans five verticals—banking, capital markets, data, insurance and money management—but much of its opportunity set stems from the wealth and asset management industries’ paradigm shift to increase alternatives’ share of the traditional 60/40 portfolio of stocks and bonds.
Eventful few months
Against this backdrop, the past few months have been eventful for Motive. With Intelligence, a hedge-fund-focused media and data company that Motive acquired in 2023 for $517 million, was sold to S&P Global for $1.8 billion at the end of 2025. Under Motive, With Intelligence did a string of acquisitions to fuel its makeover into a data-driven analytics specialist for the private market. S&P’s purchase of the company was in part a response to BlackRock’s $3.2 billion acquisition in 2025 of Preqin, which has been a PitchBook competitor in private market research.
Last November, UK-based FNZ raised a $650 million growth round from a Motive-led group of investors and customers of the wealth-management platform, which was last valued by investors at $20 billion in 2022. That came on top of FNZ’s $500 million deal, also with Motive, last April.
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Meanwhile, InvestCloud, FNZ’s US-based fellow portfolio company, has been promoting its Private Markets Account as a groundbreaking feature because it is a separately managed account that can house alternative investments alongside traditional holdings. The company says its clients administer assets of more than $3 trillion across over 10 million individual accounts.
Just last week, Motive participated in an $8.6 million seed round for Pluto, an AI-powered liquidity-solutions startup, with participation by Apollo and Hamilton Lane. As part of the deal, Hamilton Lane will be a credit partner providing loan funding for Pluto’s operation.
Early days
It may still be early days for proving the investment thesis of Motive, which was founded in 2015. In recent years, the private capital and wealth-management industries have increasingly embraced each other’s aims to bring institutional-style investment alternatives within reach of affluent households—and perhaps even mom-and-pop investors.
But they still have a long way to go. Some $150 trillion in investable capital is up for grabs in the private wealth channel, but only a small fraction of that is being allocated to alts, according to Bain estimates.
Many industry figures tout the public-private evolution as a “democratization” trend, but a more apt term may be modernization, given the massive effort underway to digitize an entire industry’s notoriously burdensome workflows. From paperwork-heavy client onboarding to portfolio construction and record-keeping to myriad other pain points, asset managers and wealth advisers have turned to fintech upstarts to ensure individual investors’ large-scale adoption of alts.
Motive’s thesis is that financial technology is a horizontal industry that cuts through every segment of the world economy, underlining a massive opportunity to innovate those systems as they enter the digital age.
“We want to be focused people with investing skills, operating skills, and innovation skills, all specifically focused around creating less friction, and to enable what we think is a new investment paradigm,” Heyvaert said.
Motive specializes in infrastructure tech for private wealth, a patchwork of processes run by numerous companies, old and new, that are trying to bring to private markets a frictionless experience equal to what the public markets built at scale. Says Heyvaert: “Many of them we are backing, or at least are connected with. We believe that creating that infrastructure is a powerful opportunity.”
Among its dozens of holdings, Motive invested in a $340 million growth round in 2022 alongside Apollo, Hamilton Lane and Franklin Templeton in CAIS, one of the leading marketplaces for GPs selling semiliquid funds and other private-market products through RIAs. Motive also joined a private investment in public equity, or a PIPE investment, in 2022 in Forge Global, a platform for trading secondhand stakes in pre-IPO companies. Charles Schwab agreed to buy Forge Global in November 2025 for $660 million.
Motive’s buyout and growth-investing arm is still writing checks out of its $2.5 billion second fund, closed in 2022. That vehicle’s lifespan may put the firm in line soon to return to the fundraising trail, but Heyvaert dismissed reports that Motive is already at work forming its third buyout fund.
Correction: The picture caption in a previous version of this article gave the wrong title for Motive Partners founder Rob Heyvaert. He is the firm’s managing partner. (Jan. 20, 2026)
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