InvestNext’s statement engine could calculate the numbers correctly, but sponsors couldn’t shape how those numbers were shown. The existing system offered basic add/remove control over fields, but no real control over layout or branding, so sponsors couldn’t even replicate the statements they already sent investors. For sponsors running non-standard structures, debt funds, or multi-class deals, that gap was actively costing deals.

I ran a competitive analysis across the category’s major platforms, paired with discovery interviews across current and onboarding sponsor accounts. Two pictures converged: the same gaps our sales team was losing deals over were the ones sponsors in active discovery kept raising unprompted.

The most costly gap was flexibility. Sponsors with non-standard fund structures couldn’t add, rename, or remove fields to match their own fund documents. Competing platforms let sponsors define any data point and build reports around it.

Layout was the second major gap. Statements exported per-project as disconnected pages, with no consolidated view across an investor’s full position. One onboarding sponsor’s statements ran 35 pages for a single investor.

A third theme was per-investor manual work at scale. One sponsor generated dozens of manually customized cover letters every quarter across hundreds of investors, with no way to templatize or merge that content.

This wasn’t hypothetical. In a review of ten recently lost deals, eight cited reporting, customization, or statements as a primary or contributing reason, accounting for the large majority of lost revenue in that set. One prospect said outright that they loved the core product, but a competitor’s statement experience was what closed the deal instead.

The new builder lets sponsors start from a template gallery organized by statement level or a blank canvas, then drag in widgets: tables, metrics, charts, and narrative blocks. Titles are editable inline, sponsors can filter by project or account, and the whole thing previews like an actual PDF, with real pagination, before anything goes out.

For sponsors transitioning off the old system, the plan was to hand-build templates that matched what they already used. That works for a handful of high-touch accounts, but it doesn’t scale. The AI Template Importer grew out of that constraint: upload an old statement, and AI reads its structure and rebuilds it as an editable starting point in the new builder.

Rather than presenting that as a finished, trustworthy conversion, I designed it to show its uncertainty, flagging any field it wasn’t confident about with a plain-language explanation and a fix field right there. It turns a service-intensive onboarding step into something sponsors can do themselves, and it’s a capability nothing else in the competitive landscape offers.

This work is still in design and hasn’t shipped yet, so there are no adoption metrics. But the direction is grounded in real signal: it directly answers the reporting gap tied to the majority of a recent set of lost deals, and early competitive analysis confirms this positions the platform ahead of, not just even with, the category.

Since this feature is still in design, these aren’t launch results, they’re the numbers that made the case for building it.

What started as a request for more flexible fields became a rethink of how sponsors relate to their own data: full control over layout and branding, a faster path off legacy formats, and an AI-assisted importer that turns a former service bottleneck into a differentiator.

Want to view a working prototype? Let’s connect below.