15 Billion Euros Flow Through His Software – And Nobody Knows the Company (Bunch Founder Levent Altunel)

Levent Altunel has built a company that now processes 15 billion euros in assets under management through its software. Yet almost nobody outside the private markets bubble knows the name. That's because Bunch isn't a consumer product — it's the operating system for fund managers in private equity and venture capital, a market whose operations have barely been modernized in decades.

Private Markets: Stuck in the 80s

Levent's core observation is striking: while you can invest in a security on Trade Republic for one euro, a private markets investment quickly costs tens of thousands of euros in operational overhead — spreadsheets, manual processes, endless email back-and-forth between investors, fund managers, and administrators. The infrastructure that's long been digitized in retail investing simply doesn't exist in comparable form in private markets.

This is exactly where Bunch comes in. The company deliberately started with a simpler entry point: SPVs (Special Purpose Vehicles), the single-purpose entities through which investors pool capital into one investment. That was a conscious wedge strategy — the simplest possible use case to break into the market.

From SPV Tool to Full-Service Fund Admin

Today, Bunch covers far more than SPVs. The product now includes investor onboarding, capital calls, accounting, and regulatory filings — essentially the entire operational stack a fund manager needs to run a fund. Bunch operates in four countries and recently acquired a company in Luxembourg.

That acquisition is no coincidence — it's strategic. Luxembourg is Europe's fund capital. A large share of European fund structures are set up there, thanks to particularly mature regulatory conditions for fund vehicles. With the Luxembourg acquisition, Bunch gains a platform that can be deployed globally — a key building block for international scaling.

How AI Changed the Addressable Market

Perhaps the most interesting part of the conversation is about the role of artificial intelligence. Fund administration is known to be extremely "sticky" — customers typically stay with their administrator for 10 to 15 years, because switching involves enormous manual migration effort. That stickiness has historically limited the addressable market for new providers: you could really only win new funds, not pull existing customers away from established administrators.

AI fundamentally changes that calculus. Bunch can now process tens of thousands of documents in an hour, making it possible to migrate existing funds — a process that used to take months. Suddenly, the market's entire "installed base" becomes a viable target, not just newly formed funds.

Consequently, Bunch isn't just building a workflow tool — it's positioning itself as an AI-native ERP system for fund data. MCP interfaces (Model Context Protocol) play a central role in making the data infrastructure AI-ready.

Fundraising, Pricing, and the Path to 100 Million in Revenue

Levent has been notably strategic in choosing his investors: every funding round was filled with specialists suited to that particular growth stage, including Motiv, Cherry Ventures, Fintech Collective, and Portage. Portage in particular brings LP experience, managing 40 to 50 billion euros in AUM itself — a perspective shift that helps Bunch better understand the market from its own customers' point of view.

On pricing, Bunch uses an AUM-based model. This allows even first-time fund managers, who don't yet manage large fund volumes, to start with Bunch, while the model scales alongside larger customers as well. By Levent's math, an average fund manager on the platform generates almost one million euros in annual revenue for Bunch — a number that makes the path to 100 million euros in revenue very concrete.

Founder Journey: From Executor to Manager of Managers

On a personal level, Levent's role has changed radically over the past three years — from hands-on executor to manager of managers. He draws a comparison to large corporations like Volkswagen, where a comparable role transition typically takes 20 years. At a fast-growing startup, that same evolution compresses into a fraction of the time.

He sums up his leadership principle in a simple formula: delegate everything — but the moment a problem surfaces, dive in deep and move fast. When it comes to hiring and the co-founder dynamic with his partner Enrico, Levent values attitude and aptitude more than pure industry expertise. The ability to quickly get up to speed on complex, regulation-heavy topics matters more to him than existing domain knowledge from the fund admin industry.

The conversation also covers Bunch's M&A strategy — a clear ambition to be a consolidator rather than get consolidated — as well as fuck-ups, lessons learned, and the resilience it takes to build a product in such a complex, regulated market that ultimately ends up managing billions in capital.