• Key insight: Startup Pluto is using private-market data and AI to offer a marketplace for "WELOCs" (wealth equity lines of credit).
• What’s at stake: Illiquid private-market exposure could shift bank balance-sheet risk and advisor offerings.
• Forward look: In the future, Pluto may offer AI-based underwriting of this credit.

Source: Bullets generated by AI with editorial review

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NEW YORK — Investors in private markets, such as private equity, private credit and venture capital, face a growing liquidity challenge, according to Neel Ganu, founder and CEO of the New York startup Pluto, which came out of stealth mode this week.

"Once your money is in, it’s locked up for five to 10-plus years," Ganu told American Banker.

Ganu is a former executive at Fidelity Investments and National Australia Bank and founder of wealth management fintech firm Finch, which was acquired by Australian product comparison site Finder in 2024. A year ago, Ganu pitched investors at Motive Partners, Apollo and Hamilton Lane on the idea of offering private investors home equity lines of credit and the conversation pivoted to a "wealth equity line of credit." They liked the "WELOC" concept more than the idea of a HELOC.

"We just want to make it really simple for [private investors] to pledge their assets and get margin," Ganu told American Banker.

The name Pluto comes from the ancient Greek god of the underworld and wealth, which the ancients "believed to be hidden underground," Ganu said. "That’s how we think about private markets today: enormous value, but buried. And like Pluto at the edge of the solar system, private markets sit at the frontier of finance. We’re building the infrastructure to bring that value into motion."

Apollo and Hamilton Lane are balance sheet partners as well as investors in the platform.

"It’s early, but I think that we’re playing into the real tailwinds that we’re seeing in the industry, broadly, of the wealth market vastly increasing the allocation percentage they have in their total portfolio to private markets," Griffith Norville, head of technology solutions at Hamilton Lane, an investment management firm that specializes in private markets and is a balance sheet partner to Pluto, told American Banker. "For closed fund investors, specifically, there’s been a real lack of [liquidity] options. We think that as the market grows, wealth investors in the private markets are going to need more options related to liquidity. There is demand today, but this is also a play on where the puck is going."

It’s become more common for companies to stay private, and not go public, Norville pointed out.

Private equity, venture capital and private credit are all opaque assets that can be hard to value and therefore challenging to lend against.

"Unless you’re an investor, you’re not going to understand how they’re performing or what they look like, and communication is pretty protected," Ganu said. But because Pluto integrates with platforms where people keep their private equity, he said, it can see the capital account statements the investors get, which shows how the investment is performing and what the net asset value is.

"We have that transparency, and that helps our balance sheet partners understand how the assets perform," Ganu said.

Hamilton Lane also has data on 200,000 private companies and 70,000 funds; some of this data goes back 50 years, according to Norville.

Pluto’s platform matches investors who need loans with balance sheet providers (which include Hamilton Lane and Apollo) looking to fund such loans, which each have different criteria for the loans they’ll take on.

"My job is really playing Tetris," Ganu said. "I take unique loan requests from different individuals and investors, and then I match them to the best balance sheet."

To date, the borrowers come from three places. One source is distribution partners like Allocate Holdings in Palo Alto, Calif., which provides a private market platform for wealth advisors and a Berlin, Germany-based private equity investing platform provider. Pluto also works directly with financial advisors who want to offer their clients loans on their investments, and for bespoke requests, it will work directly with individual investors.

Where Pluto uses AI

"You can’t launch a company in 2026 without it being AI forward," Norville said. "So Pluto’s got AI tooling to help understand the unstructured documentation that comes along with an investment in a private market fund. It can help use that unstructured data to facilitate sharing information between an owner of the fund commitment and the lenders. Ultimately it’s a platform that’s building, connecting distributors, connecting investors to the end lenders."

Ganu said Pluto uses AI in all steps of its process — to ingest data from private markets documents, to help structure legal templates to reduce cost and increase speed and to help balance sheet partners make better decisions.

AI is especially helpful in processing data gathered about alternative assets, as such information is not standardized the way public company data is, Ganu said.

David O’Connell, founder of O’Connell Lending Insights, pointed out that using AI to lend against alternative assets is new territory.

"I think folks should perform a lot of due diligence," he told American Banker. "To lend against an asset, one needs a great deal of data about it, primarily how the values of similar assets have performed in a variety of market conditions. I think anyone relying on this system to extend credit should be particularly sharp with the garden-variety AI due diligence. What datasets did the AI learn on? What data points were in it? What was the quality assurance on the data like? Also important was who built the AI capability. Was it programmers with knowledge of lending in general and the private debt market in particular or were they generalists in programming?"

Ganu said Pluto does not specifically use machine learning for evaluating underwriting decisions today.

"It is something we may explore in the future," Ganu said. "Today we are using AI to replace manual processes and create scale in a traditionally manual process."

Ganu agrees that from a traditional banking point of view, investments in private credit feel risky, and borrowing on top of that could seem even more risky.

"Definitely, these are risky assets, which is why today they’re only available to accredited investors, and folks that are able to handle that level of risk tolerance," Ganu said.

Pluto also counters risk with conservative loan-to-value ratios. If a customer pledges $100 of alternative assets as collateral, Pluto will lend 20% to 35% of that.

Pluto also supports assets that have a "super strong track record" from the largest, Tier One issuers, Ganu said. "We have a list of approved assets that is growing, but we totally understand that we’re not going to be able to support everything, and we want people to take a level of risk that is appropriate for them," he said.

Pluto also gets permission from funds to lend against assets and from the funds finds out if there are any other liens on the assets.

"I think anything that brings more liquidity to the lending markets is a good thing," O’Connell said. "And one way to source liquidity is to bring more collateral onto the grid, so to speak."

Executive Editor, Technology at Arizent, American Banker

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