A Q&A with Bill Ward: Rethinking the Technology Behind Private Capital

Bill Ward, co-founder and CEO of ARK, brings deep operating experience from the private capital and fund administration ecosystem. After years of working directly with fund administrators and GPs, Bill saw firsthand how legacy technology created unnecessary complexity, cost, and operational friction for managers and their fund admins. This Q&A explores the origins of ARK: why it was built, the gaps it set out to solve, and how those early insights shaped a modern, full-stack technology platform designed for today’s private capital workflows.

Part I: The Genesis of ARK and Solving Market Pain Points

Q1: What was the primary motivation for launching ARK, and what fundamental gaps did you see among existing capital technology providers?

Bill Ward: Problems were evident from a couple of different perspectives. From the fund administrator’s viewpoint, all the platforms were using were very and simply not easy to use. Every time you needed to make a change – update a report, or even just add a user – you had to go back to the vendor. It wasn’t a self-service or “what you see is what you get” experience. This created huge operational overhead. We had teams of people just managing systems and constantly relying on vendors for support, which costs money, takes time, and causes a lot of frustration.

Q2: So the difficulty and cost of professional services was a significant sticking point?

Bill Ward: Absolutely. I can’t tell you how many times I would ask for a report to be modified, and it would come back wrong or just take a huge amount of time and come with significant errors. This was a major motivation for starting Ark. goal was to create a platform that a GP, CFO or a fund administrator could intuitively use. Managing your investor portal or fund accounting system shouldn’t require IT support.

Q3: Beyond the administrative frustration, why was the timing right for ARK to enter the market?

Bill Ward: With the growth of the fund administration market and new capital flowing into private equity in the mid-2010s, the technology side was controlled by a few legacy players, and new managers, who were emerging rapidly, needed better technology to scale their firms as AUM grew.

Part II: Product Development and Building a Full-Stack Solution

Q4: When you were starting up, how did you think about building the functionality? What were the must-have product functionalities versus nice-to-have?

Bill Ward: We looked at the whole industry, from seed-stage fund, all the way up to a multi-billion dollar buyout fund. The one common thread was that everybody needs a portal. I thought the portals out there were lacking. On the smaller end of the spectrum, folks were using Dropbox, or Google Drive, or email. On the larger end of the spectrum, there are your legacy data rooms, which were originally designed for M&A and then retrofitted for fundraising and LP reporting, which is

Q5:Looking at where Ark is today, what’s next on the product roadmap?

Bill Ward: We see Artificial Intelligence as a significant piece of our future, allowing both LPs and GPs to query their fund data naturally – getting answers, not just documents. There’s a lot more on the portfolio side that we’re working on including tools that provide deeper insights into the managers’ portfolios.

We’re also looking at the LP experience. Right now, we’re uniquely positioned because we have such a large LP base to really understand their overall experience and how we can enhance that and make it better for investors.

Q6: How do you prioritize new functionality? Are there certain areas you’ve decided not to pursue because other providers do them better?

Bill Ward: Definitely. I think over the last 10 years or so, you’ve seen quite a lot of investment into the technology aspect of capital operations, and I think there are some people doing some really cool things out there that are tangential and complementary to what we’re doing. So, it may not make sense for us to enter some of those markets when there’s a strong player; integration with these other folks makes more sense for us and the market as a whole.

That being said, there are some things that are better built in-house, and having optionality from a product development perspective is important in the buy/build/partner decision process. We may have some overlapping functionality with our partners, but we want to work well with everyone in the market and give our clients choices in how they build their tech stack.

Q7: Can you expand on Ark’s functionality, feature depth, and breadth?

Bill Ward: On the investor portal side, we have incorporated features and capabilities that will be important for both a $20 million fund and a $5 billion fund. The same goes for fund accounting and the other core modules – we work really well for managers who are outgrowing Excel or QuickBooks, and we also support larger firms that need a truly institutional platform for more sophisticated LPs. Either way, what’s important is we want to fit your model. It’s a delicate balance, but our goal is that we don’t want to say, “hey, we can’t handle your complexity.”

Finally, ease of use is super important to us. The vast majority of our clients and users are not technical people. They’re accountants, they’re LPs, they’re IR folks, so making sure the platform is easy for them to use has always been top of mind whenever we build anything.

Part III: Implementation as a Competitive Advantage

Q8: A streamlined Implementation process is a significant part of your value proposition. How do you approach reducing multi-month, sometimes multi-year installations? How do you view that as a competitive advantage?

Bill Ward: That makes sense for certain mega funds, but, by and large, most of the funds we work with, and most of the funds in the industry, fit fairly well into known structures. And if you build your software appropriately, you can put that setup in the software and make it really easy.

So, it always bothered me that when I was in fund administration, we’d have to pay a bunch of money to set a system up that was wholly the same as, or almost wholly the same as, what we did the month prior, with a few small tweaks, and we’re paying that again and again and again. We’ve solved much of this in how we’ve built our software, so that we can onboard clients quickly.

Data is a different issue. If you have years and years of data that needs to get transferred over into a system and reconciled, that’s always going to take time and potentially cost money. But what we did was simplify our uploads and data structures, so that if your data is in good shape, it’s not a huge lift to get it into our system. On both sides, setup and data, we’ve worked to streamline and keep costs reasonable for our clients.

Part IV: Team and Culture

Q9: What do you look for in terms of skills and capabilities when building your team?

Bill Ward: I’ll start probably with culture and work our way in. We’re not very heavy-handed from a management perspective. We try to keep things flat. We empower our team. Fortunately, we’ve been hiring a lot of seasoned professionals, so they don’t need much management. But yeah, when hiring, we try to look for people who are pretty collaborative, who aren’t looking for all the attention, who are happy being a good teammate. That’s what we value, and it leads to great collaboration.

Q10: You have development, sales, and client service teams. How do you pull all that together, and how does that inform the product roadmap?

Bill Ward: Yeah, absolutely. Again, I don’t want to overuse the word, but it’s a very collaborative environment. We have our all-hands and the larger meetings, but each respective team has regular touchpoints with each other to shore up what we do on the strategic side and to make sure everybody’s talking with each other.

For instance, sales and client success work very closely on implementations and Product is often involved in those to get specific feedback. Our client success folks have access directly into the product’s development pipeline system, so they can directly add feedback, track where it’s from, and have regular updates with those guys. So product, client success, and sales meet on a regular basis, literally just to check in and see what’s new, what’s going on, to keep everybody informed. And that bleeds over into development.

Part V: The Future of the Private Markets and ARK

Q11: What do you see as the biggest operational shifts in fund operations over the next 3 to 5 years?

Bill Ward: I think AI is a big piece, so you’ll be able to do more with fewer people, and you’ll have a lot of these systems doing some of the work for you. I think we’re seeing it today already with just some basic information processing, but I think as that technology matures and gets more specialized, you’re going to see that creep further and further into the operations stack. We’re not quite there yet, but the way these things are progressing, I think we’ll see it sooner rather than later.

You’re going to see a lot more interconnectedness between these systems. As I mentioned earlier, you’ve seen a lot of investment into point solutions in the market. So going back to onboarding…digital subdocs weren’t a thing 10 years ago. They’re fairly well established now. How those start to fit into products like ours, and fundraising products, etc., is going to be huge.

I think data use is probably the third factor, coupled with AI. Overall, people are asking for more information. GPs are using information in different ways, so you’ll see a lot more demand for and availability of your data.

Q13: How do you see the relationship between GPs and fund administrators evolving?

Bill Ward: I think, and you’ve already seen this; GPs expect more and more from their fund admins, faster turn-around times and more in-depth transparency. Gone are the days of ” here’s your quarter-end closed package, we’ll see you next quarter.” Today, it’s about real-time updates and keeping things in sync and people informed. Those are probably the big ones. We’ve built Ark to accommodate those needs.