Backing Trove AI: Agents for Private Equity

If you’ve worked in private equity, you know the drill: thousands of documents, scattered data, and a ticking clock to turn it all into bulletproof analysis. The insights are buried in messy, unstructured content—and clawing them out is brutally manual.

Financial services represent about 25% of the global economy, yet most workflows still rely on the same manual processes: search, read, analyze, draft, repeat. 

We are now at a point where foundation models are primed to completely transform complex financial workflows, but only with proper data retrieval, domain specialization, and security. This insight is what led to the founding of Trove (formerly Mako), an AI associate purpose‑built for private equity firms. 

Today, we are excited to announce Menlo’s lead investment in Trove’s $7.1M seed round. Trove’s mission is to deliver associate‑level AGI across financial services to free professionals for judgment‑driven work—and their world-class team is just getting started.

Founders Who Get It

The best investments happen when domain expertise meets technical firepower at exactly the right moment. Danny Goldman and Shivaal Roy are the perfect intersection.

Danny (CEO) lived the problem firsthand as a top performer in Bain’s private equity group, leading dozens of deals. He knows which tasks eat up 80 % of an analyst’s week, which insights actually move the needle, and what caliber of analysis leads to winning investment decisions.

Shivaal (CTO) was a founding engineer and manager on Glean’s Search team. He built the first version of Glean Assistant, which set the blueprint for enterprise AI. He also cut his teeth as one of Scale AI’s first ML engineers. Few have more experience marrying AI with messy enterprise data—a problem especially acute in financial services.

Why Trove Stands Apart

In the rapidly evolving world of AI, several solutions promise to revolutionize investor workflows. Yet they often fall short, offering tools that lack the depth, integration, and security required. Trove is engineered differently:

• Unlocks firms’ knowledge: Trove directly plugs into a firm’s apps and data sources. It indexes deal and portfolio files, emails, and CRM entries, and turns the sprawl into one living, searchable brain. Users can surface any metric, file, or insight in seconds and power rich workstreams. No manual data organization needed, no drawn‑out implementation. It just works, out of the box.
• Investor-grade intelligence: This isn’t just single-shot Q&A over uploaded files. Trove can independently execute private equity workstreams that typically take investors hours: analyze a full data room, pull buried metrics from past deals, and do portfolio reporting in a firm’s exact style. The special sauce is a specialized agent that can reason through nuanced tasks, string together dozens of actions, and adapt on the fly—all in a simple interface. 
• Ironclad security: Trove has a rare “cloud-prem” deployment model, which enables their application to reside entirely within a customer’s private cloud. This hard-to-execute approach is proving to be a key unlock for winning over even the most security‑focused financial institutions.

Early Validation, Fast Growth

Trove is already embedded at major PE firms, where users call it an “indispensable teammate.” Customers report hours saved per data room review and sharper insights in their IC memos, turning one‑off trials into a daily habit. The usage data backs it up: Investors turn to the tool over a dozen times a week, a level of adoption rarely seen in this sector. 

The future of finance isn’t about replacing people; it’s about pairing smart professionals with equally smart partners. Trove is building that partner. If you’re also a founder building in the fintech space, we’d love to connect.