The challenge
The family office had a clearly stated mandate to grow direct private investments from 8 percent to 20 percent of total AUM over three years. The constraint was research bandwidth. Each direct investment required a market scan from outside counsel ($25K to $35K), an industry expert call series (about $8K), and three to four weeks of internal review.
The cost of acquisition per direct investment exceeded $50K in research alone, and the cycle time meant they could realistically execute four to six direct investments per year.
What changed
The CIO moved the office to the Brevoir Syndicate plan and rebuilt the diligence workflow around the platform:
- Discover Marketplace added a parallel sourcing channel that did not depend on warm relationships
- AI Due Diligence (Founder + Startup) replaced the outside market scan
- Continuous sector intelligence replaced the periodic industry expert calls
- Portfolio monitoring replaced the quarterly portfolio review process
The outcomes
In the first calendar year on the new stack:
- Direct investments grew 2.4x year over year
- Research spend on outside counsel dropped by approximately $120K
- Average cycle time from first signal to investment decision compressed from four weeks to under one week
- Two early signals from sector intelligence resulted in investments that the family office credits as their best of the year
The CIO has since added Brevoir to the office's tech stack as a permanent line item.
On the inside
"We were spending six figures a year on outside research. Brevoir replaced most of it for less than the cost of one report."
The mandate to grow direct investments to 20 percent of AUM is now expected to be met two years ahead of schedule.