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Inspiration

Before Savy, one of us ran a student venture fund with 50+ portfolio companies. Getting investors through accredited-investor checks was one of the slowest, most awkward parts of raising. Under SEC Rule 506(c), any fund that markets publicly must take "reasonable steps" to verify every investor is accredited. In practice that means LPs emailing tax returns and bank statements to strangers, waiting 24 to 48 business hours for a letter, and doing it all over again for the next fund.

The biggest independent player, Parallel Markets, was acquired by iCapital in 2025 and now focuses on wealth managers. Emerging funds and syndicates, the ones raising many small checks, are left with spreadsheets and PDFs. We wanted to fix that.

What it does

Savy verifies an investor once and gives them a reusable accreditation passport.

Investors link their accounts, pick a qualifying path (net worth, income, license or minimum investment), and get a signed verification letter.
Reviewers (licensed attorneys or CPAs) see a pre-built case file: rules-engine results, extracted figures and evidence. They approve with one click.
Funds send an invite link and see each LP's status, path, expiry date and signed letter. They never see balances, income or statements.
Once verified, an investor can share their passport with any participating fund in under 2 minutes.

How we built it

Rules engine first. The accreditation tests in Rule 501(a) are deterministic, so every decision can be explained and logged. For example, the net-worth test:

$$ NW = A - L \geq \$1{,}000{,}000 $$

where $NW$ is net worth excluding the primary residence (\$), $A$ is total assets excluding the primary residence (\$), and $L$ is total liabilities excluding the mortgage up to the home's value (\$). Debt added in the 60 days before investing counts against the investor.

AI where it helps. Document parsing for uploads (K-1s, trust and entity documents), confidence scoring, and triage into auto, fast review or full review. A human signs every letter.
A role-based demo console with four connected views (Admin, Issuer, Investor, Reviewer) running on shared state, so an approval in one view shows up live in the others.
A full design system built from our shield logo: color tokens with accessible light and dark themes, a type scale, and components such as the passport card and status badges.
Customer discovery alongside the build: we interviewed 4 VC fund managers and syndicate leads about how they verify LPs today, and turned what we heard into a non-binding pilot letter of intent. 2 funds have signed LOIs to pilot Savy.

Challenges we ran into

Legal precision. "Verified," "approved" and "compliant" mean different things to a regulator. We rewrote the product copy so it never overpromises compliance.
Privacy versus proof. Funds need a defensible record, and investors don't want their finances exposed. Our answer: funds get status plus a signed letter, and raw data is deleted after the decision.
Edge cases. Joint filers, trusts, LLCs that need a look-through to their owners, and income near the threshold all need their own rules and routing.
Scoping. Credit-bureau and IRS data come with heavy compliance requirements (FCRA, IRS enrollment), so the MVP starts with account linking plus document review.

What we learned

Talk to funds before building features. Across 4 customer interviews, the same pains kept coming up: slow letters, chasing LPs for documents, and re-verifying the same investors for every fund. 2 of those conversations turned into signed LOIs.
Funds aren't really paying for a checkbox. They're paying for liability protection: a logged, defensible "reasonable steps" record.
In March 2025 the SEC began accepting a minimum investment (\$200K for individuals, \$1M for entities) plus a written self-certification as verification. That shrinks the problem for big checks, so the real pain sits with small-check funds and syndicates.
Reuse is the moat. Each passport makes every later verification cheaper for us and faster for the investor.

What's next

Run pilots with our 2 LOI funds, then expand to more emerging VC funds and syndicates.
SOC 2, a licensed-reviewer network, and live account linking.
An API for fund admins and syndication platforms, then expansion into full investor onboarding (KYC/AML, subscription docs, qualified-purchaser checks).