A reminder: Modus occasionally sends timely newsletters in addition to, or in place of, the regular Friday newsletter.
Addepar, the wealth and investment management software company, released its own artificial intelligence platform called “Addison” to most of its over 1,400 customers on Tuesday. Among those are hundreds of family offices, which Addepar says can use the tool to thoughtfully blur the lines between employees' roles and responsibilities, freeing them up for other tasks.
“Particularly for family offices, it is about giving them time back in the day,” Bob Pisani, chief technology officer at Addepar, told Modus.
The arrival of Addison was a question of when, not if.
A small group of Addepar customers was privately beta-testing the tool over recent months before its debut this week in the U.S., U.K. and European Union countries. Janeen France, who was recently named Addepar’s first-ever chief client officer, told Modus in November that one of her objectives was to help make Addepar the AI foundation for family offices.
The 15-year-old company, which aggregates portfolio, market and client data for more than $9 trillion in assets and often touts its $100 million annual investment into research and development, was also already using AI for its Alts Data Management and internal coding before acquiring the AI workflow company Arcus in May of last year. After the deal, it ramped up the development of Addison.
Pisani said that customers had been asking Addepar for an AI tool. It took time to roll out because, considering the software’s capabilities and cost, it wanted to meet or exceed the high expectations of its users. The tool had to be “rigorous, rich and reliable,” Pisani said. Anything less than “robust” would be a disappointment.
“We've put in a lot of effort into really thinking about AI at depth; how to build it natively into our platform and accelerate and amplify the value that Addepar has built over almost 15 years,” he added.
Addepar’s AI platform looks and works like popular AI tools, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude—Addison uses those and other large language models depending on the task. It also maintains the necessary privacy, security, and guardrails for users; inputs from one user aren’t revealed or used to answer others' questions. “We build everything and host our native infrastructure,” Kunal Gosar, the new head of AI at Addepar, said.
Also, like the popular AI tools, Addison’s beta testers have been using it for a wide variety of tasks, from portfolio analysis and investment research to simple queries that deliver answers and context faster than it would take someone to click around a website. Addepar has used the first few months of activity to inform its focus. “These are massive accelerants. And so what's actually really cool is that we can watch as people are doing these things, and that informs our product roadmap,” Gosar said, referring to AI agents.
AI agents, or autonomous software that perceive, make suggestions and take action with minimal human intervention. This is what will help family offices reach “new levels operation leverage,” according to Addepar’s leaders.
Imagine, abstractly, a family office is a fraction. Tasks are the numerator, and employees are a small denominator; even saving just a few hours of time each week can accumulate to a meaningful difference, or make that denominator bigger.
Historically, Addepar is among the most expensive software used by private investors, sometimes exceeding a six-figure annual fee. Like many software products, it takes training and experience to get the most out of it. Large wealth management organizations that use Addepar commonly post jobs seeking candidates familiar with it. Hiring someone unfamiliar with it means facing a sort of human J-curve: they will cost money and won’t perform as expected at first, but the goal is for their value to leverage the software to far surpass that cost.
At large wealth management firms, that is fine. But for most single-family offices, which likely have fewer than 10 employees, the decision might not be clear on whether that investment and J-curve timeline are worth it. Addepar recognizes that conundrum and says that Addison can resolve it by making its software more accessible and usable to more employees.
“We only want to get paid for what we deliver value on. If a client is paying for something but they're unable to use it, or they can't scale it up, I appreciate that,” Prisani said. “We do think that AI flattens and closes the gap. If someone could have the best system, and we certainly believe we have it, but now all of a sudden the usability gap is gone and the time to value gap has shrunk, that actually justifies the investment because now you're getting value versus, and that margin expands. If you can reduce all that friction, then you're having a much more timely and in-the-moment conversation about how you, frankly, leverage the system and capture value from it.”
Family-office employees are “suffering from a massive swivel chair problem,” using Addepar along with a dozen other systems, with Excel spreadsheets in between.
“They don't want to have 10 or 20 different tools. This is something that Addepar is fundamentally thinking about, regardless of AI: How do we get better integration and connectivity? Ultimately, what they really want is to just run their workflows from a central point, talk to an AI and a set of agents that oversee all of that, and have where it happens abstracted away.”
Every SaaS company is rushing to bolt on AI features. But an AI layer on top of a static system of record is still a static system of record.
The private markets are driven by complex reasoning that legacy platforms were never designed to capture:
Why you sized that position differently
What made those terms acceptable
Why you chose one manager over another
That institutional knowledge is your edge. And it’s been leaking through the cracks of disconnected tools for years.
Unlimited.ai was built differently — AI-native from the ground up. LAILA, our expert private markets agent, doesn’t just sit on top of your data. She orchestrates it: automated data extraction, consolidated performance reporting, document organization, liquidity analytics, and due diligence management — all in one platform that actually understands your consolidated portfolio. Not as an add-on. As the foundation.
Designed by a team of expert family office leaders who have deployed billions into the private markets, Unlimited.ai was purpose-built to solve the “Complexity Problem” — not to retrofit yesterday’s architecture with today’s buzzwords.
The future of the private markets isn’t a feature update. It’s a fundamentally different approach. This is what AI-native actually means. See it for yourself at Unlimited.ai.”
More News
- From the newsletter last week: Is the Modus Family Office Tech Map Doomed?
- Deutsche Bank’s Epstein Files Throw Family Offices Into the Open.
- Interesting: Kalshi Says MrBeast Employee Violated Insider Trading Rules.
- Blackstone’s Schwarzman Took Home a Near-Record $1.24 Billion in 2025.
- Private Equity for All: The Paradoxical Push to Democratize Private Markets: “We argue that the push to democratize private equity is subject to a glaring paradox. Far from sharing the spoils of private equity with the public, opening private markets to retail investors at scale is likely to erode or eliminate each and every one of the supposed advantages of private equity over public markets—not just for retail investors but across the market. Consequently, whether private equity’s appeal lies in superior investor returns or superior corporate governance, broad retail access is likely to ensure that neither one is achieved.”
- An interesting opinion essay related to streaming royalties and other payments to musicians: How George Harrison Transformed the Music Business.
- The Man Who Broke Into Jail.
Jobs
- Stryde Search featured job: A distinguished, privately held wealth management firm is hiring a director to lead comprehensive family office services for an elite clientele of families and select institutions in Manhattan. You’ll report directly to the firm’s head of family office, shape the group’s strategy, and collaborate with a multidisciplinary team of investment, tax, legal, and service professionals. Ideal candidates will have advanced credentials and 10+ years of experience in private banking or multifamily offices. Compensation includes a base salary of $250,000, a bonus and a benefits package. To explore confidentiality, contact Karen Berry at kb@strydesearch.com.
- Ballmer Enterprises is hiring a systems engineer in Bellevue, Washington. This person will report to the VP of finance and “collaborate with stakeholders across multiple entities and organizations to manage and enhance Ballmer organizations’ financial systems.” The maximum salary for the role is $173,000, and it offers other benefits.
- Chris Canavan is helping a family office in Vancouver, Canada, look for a senior executive assistant.
- Jordan Park is hiring a vice president of client advisory in New York City.
Other Stuff
- Join 2,000+ other readers and follow Modus on LinkedIn.
- Send me news tips about: software companies and service providers that count family offices as customers, new family offices opening, old ones dissolving, family-office-relevant information about asset managers and investment banks, and anything else you think like-minded readers would want to know. To share information in confidence, you can reply to this email or message me on Signal, using a personal device that your employer cannot access.
- Want to sponsor Modus? Fill out this form and learn why half of 2026 is already sold out.
I am...
- Recovering from the move to a new apartment and ramping back up today with back-to-back meetings in Midtown and lunch at Locanda Verde with sources.
- Still thinking about the “Traitors” finale. Speaking of TV, I might have to watch “Industry” because I haven’t yet, and people keep messaging me about it…
