Built by someone who has sat on every side of the problem.
Financial decisions in private markets are routinely made on numbers that have never been independently verified. PROVEN is built by a founder who has sat on every side of that problem: as CPA and auditor, as CFO of broker-dealer subsidiaries at a publicly traded firm, as institutional CFO, and as co-founder of two multi-manager investment platforms before this one.
This is an infrastructure problem.
Private markets have run on a working assumption. Not the obvious one — that reports can be trusted and sampled once a year — but a deeper one: that management-reported numbers are the correct starting point for every other tool in the stack. The general ledger records them. The annual audit samples against them. Portfolio monitoring software charts them. None of those tools questions the numbers themselves.
That's the assumption that's breaking. Capital has grown, LPs and regulators expect more of what they get, and the room the industry once had for interpretive reporting has narrowed. What private markets need now isn't another tool that takes management-reported numbers and does something new with them. It's an independent layer underneath all of that, providing the verification the rest of the stack has always assumed but never actually had.
The point isn't that management reporting is dishonest. It's that reporting is interpretive, and the capital being deployed against those interpretations is too large for interpretation to safely carry.
John Cunningham
Founder, PROVEN
Mr. Cunningham started out as a CPA and auditor at Deloitte. That's where he learned how financial statements get built, verified, and signed off — and where he first ran into the limits of what audit sampling can actually catch.
At Greenwich Capital Markets, reporting to both the CFO and the Head of Risk, he built a real-time risk monitoring system that met Bank of England regulatory requirements across the firm's fixed-income trading desks, the ABS and CMBS securitization books, and the funding desks.
He later served as CFO of two broker-dealer subsidiaries of Knight Trading Group, the publicly traded market-making firm. As the SEC-licensed principal for those subsidiaries, he signed the quarterly FOCUS Reports filed with the SEC and carried personal regulatory liability for every number in them. He also redesigned the firm's close cadence from monthly to daily, reducing operating risk and improving efficiency and scalability.
In 2004, he left Knight to co-found WR Capital Management with Walter Raquet, the co-founder of Knight Trading Group. WCM was a multi-manager investment platform, a pioneer in the category.
He then served as CFO of Two Sigma, working across all of Two Sigma's businesses. For the core Two Sigma hedge fund business, rather than implement the traditional internal books-and-records process, he pioneered a second-administrator model that freed the team to focus on higher-value work — a structural innovation still in place at Two Sigma more than fifteen years later, and one subsequently replicated at Bridgewater Associates and other large hedge funds.
In 2018, he co-founded Atom Investors, a technology-driven multi-manager investment platform launched with $1 billion in assets, making it one of the largest hedge fund launches of the year. As COO, Mr. Cunningham designed Atom's accounting, operations, treasury, and reporting infrastructure around technology and workflow rather than around headcount. The Atom platform ran roughly forty pods with a Controller and Ops Manager (2 FTEs), supplemented by part-time UT Austin interns. The core headcount did not grow during the first five years. Comparable multi-manager platforms typically staff operations and accounting teams that scale with pod count.
PROVEN is the company he wishes he'd had at every job on this page.
A pattern runs through the work above. At Greenwich Capital Markets, he built real-time risk monitoring for Bank of England requirements because there was no alternative: no existing system did this, no instructions existed for building one, and no monitoring meant no trading. At Two Sigma, he rebuilt the finance and operational platform from scratch and, rather than licensing a standard books-and-records system, used the third-party administrator to provide internal books and records — a structural move that created a new category in the administrator industry. At Atom Investors, as COO, he designed the operational infrastructure around technology and workflow rather than headcount, running a multi-manager platform at a fraction of the staffing levels comparable platforms require. PROVEN continues that pattern. The work is the same as the work before it: he understands the problem, maps what is possible, and designs a new solution for it.
Deloitte
Learned as a CPA how financials are built, verified, and signed off. Saw where audit sampling falls short by design.
Knight Trading Group
CFO of two broker-dealer subsidiaries of the publicly traded market-making firm. SEC-licensed principal with personal regulatory liability for every filing.
Two Sigma
Ran finance, ops and treasury at a $60+ billion hedge fund. Pioneered a second-administrator model that changed institutional books and records.
WR Capital Management & Atom Investors
Co-founded two multi-manager investment platforms fourteen years apart. Both built around technology and workflow rather than headcount.
PROVEN
Every role above led here. PROVEN is the independent verification layer private markets never had — built for the full investment lifecycle, before you commit and through the hold period.
Are you ready for Proven numbers?
If you're a PE, VC, or private credit investor and you think independent verification would change how you diligence or monitor, let's talk.
A founder reply within one business day.