Lumonic 12.0: the self-monitoring portfolio

Why we built this

Before portfolio monitoring was a category, it was a spreadsheet.

You know it. You probably still use it every day.

Excel.

I’ve spent most of my career trying to reduce its prevalence inside private markets. I also know its power and allure all too well. It’s flexible, familiar, and remarkably good at turning messy information into whatever answer you need.

In portfolio monitoring, the great Excel replacement journey has endured at least two generations of software.

Gen 1.0 was largely a centralized datastore. Quite literally: take numbers from spreadsheets and put them on the internet.

Then came Gen 2.0. The same flexible storage, with some shiny new bells and whistles: data extraction suites, dashboards, performance calculation engines, Excel plugins, public APIs, and, more recently, MCPs. All tooling to enhance data in and data out, aimed at providing leverage for the manual workflows of portfolio management teams.

The common thread? The software got better, but the workflow stayed human.

At Lumonic, the last 3.5 years have been spent building exactly this: a robust system of record and suite of tools now used by some of the largest private credit and private equity firms in the world.

To earn that right, two things had to be true: The underlying data model had to be flexible enough to represent a firm’s data and lineage across asset classes, entities, and relationships. The tooling had to be powerful enough to actually do the work, and materially better than what came before it.

Extracting complex data buried in gigabytes of XLSX and PDF files, applying transformations across different entity structures and period types, handling FX conversions, custom aggregations, and producing repeatable, auditable results is only a small portion of portfolio monitoring - and alone, not for the faint of heart.

Making data legible to AI is paramount. This is not a secret, nor an original thought. It’s the primary focus for every tech forward firm in the world. But I want to emphasize - the foundation matters even more as we move toward autonomy. If the data is wrong, the workflow is wrong. If the context is lost, the decision is lost. If the result isn't auditable, you can't trust it. Autonomy compounds whatever is underneath it.

We believe we've gotten enough of that foundation correct to innovate the next generation.

Today we are releasing our latest version of Lumonic which we believe defines a new generation in portfolio monitoring. Lumonic 12.0 ships with an all new platform layer you can use to work, instruct, schedule, and scale to accomplish an infinite variety of workflows autonomously. It functions like a power user that expertly uses the tooling we’ve spent years perfecting along with a new programmatic backend on your behalf. This fundamentally changes UX and is a massive leap forward toward our gen 3.0 northstar - a self monitoring portfolio.

What's broken today

Your firm's context is tribal knowledge - Two analysts at the same firm can interpret the same reporting pack differently. Ex. Adjusted EBITDA defined in every credit agreement as a paragraph of legal text. Verbose legal text leaves room for interpretation by each analyst. Most of our customers catch differences with a time-intensive maker-checker review. Context lives in people's heads and last month's file. A scavenger hunt commences every time a number is questioned.

Every portfolio question becomes a project - The most common complaint we hear about portfolio monitoring products; “Great, we have all this data, now what?” The data is structured and available, but hard to use. Getting an answer means learning a new interface for building reports. An LP request in the middle of a fundraise turns into a fire drill. A management request blending datasets like portfolio company financials, security attributes and deliverable tracking turns into an all nighter (the working kind).

Getting from documents to decisions - Data is constantly flowing from portfolio companies. No one has time to read through all of it, so it waits for the quarterly review. Put differently, nobody is on call for the portfolio. When a document comes in, someone has to open it, interpret the information, and tell the deal team. Each step waits for whoever has time; a lengthy prerequisite just to have to reinterpret the latest dashboard. A firm should be able to re-underwrite the day a covenant test fails or a company misses budget.

What 12.0 is

Lumonic now has a power user that can run the platform on your behalf. It works from your firm's own context, every company nuance and field definition you've set up. Explain the work in plain English, the same way you would to a new analyst on your team. Ex. Trigger when a reporting pack lands, "run the covenant tests and flag any restatements, then stage it for my review." Every decision and nuance for each company carries into the next period, so the next document from that company arrives ready for your review. It uses the same tools your analysts use today and gets the result a person would have gotten. Every number it produces is auditable down to the page it came from, and you can open any task and see every step it took.

Revisiting our broken list:

Your firm's decisions carry forward - Every decision your team makes when extracting data from a reporting pack is captured, so the next pack arrives with those decisions already applied. Ex. Your analysts decide which of a company's addbacks count toward adjusted EBITDA under its credit agreement, and Lumonic applies that decision every quarter. Two analysts don't end up with different numbers from the same reporting pack anymore.

Ask for the report in plain English - Type the question the way you'd ask an analyst, "which companies missed budget and are late on their reporting?", and get back a table in the same reporting tools your team uses today, so you can open it and keep editing. If you're not sure what to ask, Lumonic suggests what firms like yours track, drawn from our templates.

Lumonic is on call for the portfolio - When a document lands or a number changes, your firm's own workflow runs right then. By the time you log in, last night's documents are extracted and what needs your attention is waiting for you (companies late on reporting, your portfolio watchlist, or flash commentary drafted for review). The quarterly review runs on current numbers and you can re-underwrite the day a covenant test fails.

The self-monitoring portfolio

In Lumonic 12.0, anything your team does on the platform can be delegated to a power user. Today, our team sets up those workflows with you. Next, you’ll be able to brief Lumonic the same way you’d brief a new analyst: describe the work once, and it runs. Lumonic will suggest where to start based on what we’ve seen work across asset managers of every size.

The result is a portfolio that gets easier to monitor over time.

Decisions from each review carry into the next. Your firm's definitions and workflows follow every new company you bring into the portfolio. What your team teaches Lumonic once becomes part of how the portfolio is monitored going forward.

Eventually, the portfolio monitors itself. Your team's time goes to the decisions that require judgment: actions, marks, and value creation plans.

We call it the self-monitoring portfolio.

Give us the documents from your last reporting cycle and we'll run them through Lumonic. You'll see the data extraction we'll put up against anyone you're evaluating, run on your own documents, with every number traced back to the page it came from. Hold anyone else to the same test.

There's no new system to learn. We're excited to see what you delegate first.