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Ardenwood Advisors
The operating layer for the deals
you're already running.
A short follow-up to last week's call — written for Flora, with the answers to the open questions on Blackstone access, master series structuring, and what the platform actually does.
The shape of what you're building.
Before pitching anything, the picture we took away from last week. If any of this is wrong, that's the first thing we want to know.
RIA serving international LPs through SPVs
Arden Global Family Offices on top, Ardenwood Advisors as the SEC-registered RIA, deals running through series like Arden Anthropic Series One. LPs across the U.S., China, and Singapore.
$10M today, $100M on the horizon
Last raise capped under $10M. The next few — Anthropic, ByteDance, Prometheus-shaped names — could scale toward $100M each. Frequency is high; lead times are short.
Wirehouse → RIA, $1–2M typical ticket
Assets transitioning in from the wirehouse channel. Individual checks usually $1–2M into private placements. You want to aggregate them into proprietary feeders rather than route through external platforms.
Compliance is the part that keeps moving
Form D and Blue Sky filings on the last Anthropic deal didn't fully land. K-1s, audits, offshore DD on Asian LPs — all real work that scales with deal count, not a fixed cost.
The operating layer for RIAs running alts.
Aqua is the platform RIAs use to stand up SPVs, feeder funds, and white-labeled fund-of-funds — and run them through their full lifecycle. Built for SEC-registered advisors, which means audit, compliance, and reporting are in the box, not bolted on.
A note on Sydecar
We work alongside the Sydecar team — they're great at simple venture SPVs. When someone arrives at Sydecar with a deal that needs RIA-grade compliance, audit support, K-1s, or international LP onboarding, the team there often points them to us. That's the kind of work Aqua is purpose-built for.
One stack, cradle to audit.
Each of these is something a single-purpose vendor sells separately. On Aqua they share a data model, a compliance posture, and one annual fee.
Entity formation
Master series + new series spin-up
KYC / AML
Onshore + enhanced offshore DD
Subscriptions
Digital docs, e-sign, segregated accounts
Capital calls
Wires in, distributions out
Fee collection
Mgmt fee, carry, RIA economics
Quarterly reporting
LP statements, performance, K-1s
Audit + filings
Form D, Blue Sky, fund audit
One master entity. A new series for every deal.
For a shop running back-to-back private placements at your size, this is the structure that keeps audit and filings consolidated while letting each deal stand on its own.
Arden Global Master Series, LLC
Anthropic
Existing deal, repapered
ByteDance
Next placement
Prometheus-shaped
On the runway
Open
~8 business hours to spin up
Own the feeder. Keep the carry.
Today, when your clients access institutional alts through external feeder platforms, the feeder economics route to that platform. Run your own feeder on Aqua and that revenue stays inside Ardenwood — same client experience, same fund access, different P&L.
External feeder
Proprietary Ardenwood feeder
Direct lines into the funds you actually want.
Following up specifically on the Blackstone question from last week — yes, and there's more to it than one fund.
Blackstone — including infra products
Direct subscription path into Blackstone vehicles — including the institutional infrastructure exposure clients usually have to go around the long way to reach.
Class I where it exists
RIA-only institutional share classes — typically the lowest-fee tranche, gated to the channels you're now in. We aggregate eligible LPs to clear minimums.
Onshore + offshore wrappers
Fund-of-fund or dedicated SPV per deal. Tax-exempt and offshore wrappers for your Asia-based LPs without an outside admin in the loop.
Beyond Blackstone
Connections into the rest of the institutional alts shelf — secondaries, infra, private credit, direct-deal SPVs. Built to onboard new fund managers on request, not just the names already plumbed in.
The unsexy work, fully covered.
This is the chapter most platforms hand back to you. For an SEC-registered RIA, it's the chapter that matters most when something gets reviewed.
Form D & Blue Sky, every state
Form D filed federally; Blue Sky filed in every state where an LP resides. The gap that hit the last Anthropic deal closes structurally — it's not a checklist item.
White-glove offshore DD
Onshore U.S. KYC closes near-instantly. China and broader Asia LPs get enhanced DD with a dedicated team — usually a few extra business days, not a few extra weeks.
Fund audit handled in-stack
Annual fund audit and K-1s run through one pipeline with the same auditors across deals. Audit cost shared across the master series instead of priced one at a time.
Segregated accounts per series
Every series gets its own bank account. No commingling between deals — clean for both audit and any LP-level inquiry.
Quarterly LP statements + portal
Performance, position, capital account — generated and distributed through a branded LP portal. Same surface for U.S. and offshore investors.
Designed for the SEC reading
Workflows assume the file gets opened. Audit trails, filings, e-signed subs and KYC packets all sit in one place — the answer to a regulator's question is one query, not one fire drill.
One number. Paid by the fund.
Aqua's all-in fee on capital raised — the line you'd otherwise be assembling from a half-dozen vendors and audit invoices.
There is no cost to Ardenwood as the firm. The fee is borne at the fund level by the LPs investing in each series, the same way audit and admin would be in any other structure. Ardenwood pays nothing out of firm P&L to use the platform.
Live structure, live in days.
A realistic path from "let's go" to a series accepting wires. The pace is built around how short-notice your placements actually run.
Onboarding call
Confirm structure, walk through your existing deals, identify which migrate now vs. which start fresh on the platform.
Master series stood up
Arden Global master entity formed, base filings prepared, banking provisioned, LP portal branded.
New series, ready to fund
Each new deal gets its own series with a dedicated bank account in roughly eight business hours from the green light.
Quarterly + audit cycle
LP statements quarterly, K-1s on schedule, annual audit consolidated across the master. Filings handled deal-by-deal as they happen.
A short, concrete proposal.
Three steps that get you from this deck to a working master series with the next deal already loaded.
Thanks for the time last week, Terra. Rohan Marwaha · CEO, Aqua · rohan@investwithaqua.com