How we build for the LP–GP ecosystem

When we started Sightglass, we spent countless hours with Investor Relations teams at GPs and with the diligence and investment teams at LPs. We knew the current due diligence questionnaire process was painful. We assumed that the pain points felt were a result of an unavoidable tradeoff that left one side with a better experience. We quickly learned the truth: the process was painful for both sides!

GPs were regularly inundated with requests and didn't have the time to respond thoughtfully to each limited partner. IR leads were sure they had answered similar questions before, but weren't able to leverage that past work for a variety of reasons: the person who usually answered those questions had left the firm, the information was lost to old email threads and disorganized shared drives, or the IR person was new and didn't even know where to start. Frustrated, the IR lead would simply start again from scratch and take hours to draft surface level responses.

Meanwhile, LPs were spending hundreds of hours trying to customize requests for GPs so they could see previous answers.  And they weren’t even asking all the questions they wanted answered because they knew the process was too burdensome for their investment managers.  

Painful all around. When we learned that the predominant form of requesting and sharing information was emailing a Microsoft Word document and hoping for a timely response, we knew that purpose-built technology could solve problems for both the LP and the GP.

Enter Sightglass

In March, we launched our first product, DDQ automation, which gives GPs a first draft response populated with their own information on the platform, which they can review and edit before sending to their LPs. While this product exceeded expectations by cutting down the time to respond to these requests by 90%+, we knew we could create even more value.

In October, we launched our AI-powered data room, to allow GPs to push more data to their LPs and speed up the diligence process during the most intense time period for IR teams – fundraising. Our data rooms allow LPs to self-serve more information in their diligence process so they get what they need without a request ever hitting a GP’s inbox. This solution doesn’t just speed up response time – it eliminates the need for a response altogether.

Key to our approach is that we work to align incentives between GPs and their LPs. GPs have the incentive to put the highest quality information in their data rooms to power AI-generated responses, so LPs get better information and don’t even need to request it. Meanwhile, LPs are able to make faster decisions in the fundraising process so GPs can close faster and start investing.

This design principle of always seeking out win-win solutions for LPs and GPs permeates all of our product decision making. Investment partnerships are decades long relationships, so we want our product to engender trust, increase transparency, and deliver efficiency to the entire ecosystem.

Who we are

We’re a team of engineers, designers, and product leaders with decades of experience in finance and technology, with stints at Amazon, JPMorgan, McKinsey, Guideline, and data visualization startups. We’re headquartered in Portland, OR, but are remote-first. We’re just getting started and have lots to build.

If building a network ecosystem of LPs and GPs in the $10+ trillion dollar private markets sounds like fun, reach out at hello@usesightglass.com.  We’re always looking for great people, and are actively hiring engineers and GTM leaders.

Back to building!