Y Combinator-backed startup Demeter, an AI back office solution for private market investors launched on Feb. 10. Starting with portfolio management, the startup claims to automate performance tracking to provide insights in minutes at a low cost.
Part of YC’s winter 2025 cohort, Demeter is co-founded by Qiaochu Li and Dev Jain. While Li used to be a private equity analyst at Macquarie, investing in companies in various verticals including FinTech and government services, Jain was previously a software engineer at Curri. The two met during their time at University of Texas, Austin where Li graduated with a dual degree in mathematics and finance while Jain studied mechanical engineering and economics.
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“During my time in private equity, I couldn’t help but feel the inefficiencies—manual processes, scattered data, and the constant struggle to extract insights quickly. I was fortunate to work with some of the best, but even great people can be held back by outdated tools,” Li wrote in a LinkedIn post, elaborating that Demeter aimed to remove friction, enabling teams to focus on insights rather than data wrangling.
Demeter allows users to see their portfolio broken down by asset class so they can always see the diversification. The AI-driven tool is also integrated to all investment portals so that portfolios are automatically uploaded and updated. All calculations and values are directly cited to documents in order to make verification easy.
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Other features include complex entity structures for wealth management and private equity, report generation, summarized updates for company and fund reports, custom dashboards that allow users to track the metrics they care about across all your portfolio, and automatic integrations into all portfolios.
“Why do developers get all the cool new tech, but private equity back offices are stuck with legacy systems?” Li said, adding that Demeter is ideal for anyone struggling with portfolio monitoring.