Four Months to a Compliant Private Markets Platform

The Challenge

Tower Peak Partners is a partner-led global private equity firm headquartered in London, with offices in New York and Brazil. The firm competes on product innovation, international reach, and technology, which meant it needed something most managers never attempt: a proprietary operating platform covering the full lifecycle of the firm, from deal origination through finance, with compliance context in place before the first agent went to work

Simon Knowles joined Tower Peak in January as Managing Partner and Global Head of Technology, arriving after 25 years building asset management technology, most of it at Goldman Sachs, where he served as Technology MD for Europe and sat on the European Management Committee. At Tower Peak, he owns application development, infrastructure, cyber security, technology risk, and all of the firm's data and AI.

The mandate from the partners was direct: build an in-house platform covering the full lifecycle of a global private markets firm, ahead of the first fund close, in order to grow and scale.

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Why Hiring  Wasn't the Answer

The traditional route to a firm-wide platform is a team of specialists: financial markets knowledge on one side, data engineering on the other, assembled and managed over a multi-year build.

"Hiring a team of experts to do that, with knowledge of financial markets and knowledge of data engineering, would have taken too long. We needed an alternative approach, and that's why we reached out to Genesis."

Knowles estimated the traditional path would have meant five to ten specialists on a multi-year build just to get the foundation in place. Genesis absorbed that workload instead.

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Why Genesis

Tower Peak evaluated a number of agentic platforms and AI vendors before choosing Genesis, a decision that lines up with what other financial services firms are finding as they try to develop agents that add real value rather than generic automation. For Knowles, the deciding factor wasn't a feature checklist, it was who built it.

"Genesis really stood out because of the founding team. Every member of the Genesis company has come from financial services or big tech. A number of the senior members of the Genesis group have helped build the financial services we see today, and have experience of how that market has changed over the last 50 years."

That experience shows up directly in the product. Knowles works weekly with a senior Genesis engineer who was one of the founding members of the SecDB team at Goldman Sachs in the 1990s, the risk system that became foundational infrastructure across the industry.

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The Deployment

Genesis runs on Tower Peak's own infrastructure, with data and AI operating side by side rather than across a patchwork of vendor systems, coordinated through what Genesis calls its agentic control plane for data engineering. Everything runs in-house, on Tower Peak’s hardware.

"The most successful firms within financial services have recognized that they need to build proprietary software in order to have competitive advantage over their peers. Genesis allows us to do that, because everything runs in-house on our hardware, with the data and AI running next to each other."

In four months, Tower Peak used Genesis to build the data foundations of its AI infrastructure, along with a suite of applications running the core of the business: deal origination, client reporting, risk management, and finance.

Genesis Now Supports Four Core Functions at Tower Peak:

• Deal origination: agents that read deal rooms and surface relevant information without manual sorting
• Investment research: agent-generated research content supporting the investment process
• Investment committee support: agents assisting IC workflows directly
• Institutional knowledge: a context graph capturing how the firm operates, so new agents inherit existing knowledge rather than starting cold

How Tower Peak Onboarded Its First Data Engineering Agent

Rather than treating Eve, the firm's Genesis agent, as a generic tool, Tower Peak onboarded it the way it would onboard a new employee, on the advice of Genesis CEO Matt Glickman, and gave it clear role-based access controls from day one.

1. Eve was assigned the same first task any new joiner at a financial services firm receives: compliance training.
2. Eve read every relevant compliance document at the firm, including policies, regulations, laws, and best practices.
3. That institutional knowledge was captured in the Genesis context graph rather than isolated to a single session.
4. Every other agent spun up afterward inherited that same compliance context automatically.

"We followed the advice of Matt Glickman, the CEO of Genesis Computing. He said to treat Eve and our agents the same way we treat any new joiner to our firm... It is inherited by all the other agents that we spin up and start to use as part of the system, and it allows us to stay in line with the regulations and stay safe."

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The Transformation

What Changed

Before Genesis, Tower Peak was using AI models the way most firms do: in isolation, without memory of the firm's specific context, deals, or decisions.

"Prior to using Genesis, we were leveraging the AI models in isolation. While they were able to create software, they didn't come with the context and the knowledge that's required in order to grow and scale the firm. This institutional memory is the real key to the Genesis platform, and with it we can create intellectual property for the firm that has lasting, perpetual value."

That shift, from stateless AI tools to agents with persistent institutional memory, is what let a small technology function stand up a full firm platform instead of a single point solution.

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ROI Summary

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Beyond the Build

For Knowles, the platform isn't a project with an end date; it's infrastructure the firm will keep compounding.

"Most people see AI as a process-automation tool. Genesis is a lot more than a process-automation tool. What we can do is harness the experience of the partners we have at the firm, along with almost limitless agents, in order to support more companies, more firms, and make more impact in the world, given the scale and growth that's now possible through the Genesis platform."

His advice to other firms facing a similar build is direct:

"Before embarking on your next build challenge, or if you're facing an infrastructure that needs a rewrite, reach out to the Genesis team. You won't regret it."