Utah's $4.8 billion permanent fund for public education, screening fund managers across venture, private equity buyout and other private market strategies.
Industry
Finance
Use Case
Manager research and fund screening
Company size
Headquarters
Salt Lake City, Utah, US
Knowledge work automation
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About
SITFO, Utah’s School and Institutional Trust Funds Office, manages a $4.8 billion permanent fund for the state’s public education programs. Its investment team allocates to external managers across asset classes, from venture and private equity buyout to more specialised strategies such as mining and royalties.
That means a constant flow of new opportunities. “We see a lot of pitch books and fund ideas on a daily basis,” the team says.
Ryan Kulig, Finance and Operations Officer, leads SITFO’s finance and operations work, including AI implementation. Johnny Lauder, Investment Officer, works with the investment team on manager research and selection. Together they set a clear goal: put the whole team on one platform, and automate everything from sourcing to the go or no-go decision, which SITFO calls the preliminary IC.
“We wanted to have our team log into one platform and use one tool.”
The challenge
Every new fund that reaches SITFO comes with a pitch book, and the promising ones come with a data room. Before the team can decide whether a manager deserves more of its time, someone has to read it all.
That took an analyst eight to 10 hours per data room: combing through the files, pulling out the data points that matter and sorting them against SITFO’s own investment framework. With pitch books and fund ideas arriving daily, much of the team’s capacity went on assembling information rather than judging it.
The work also had to be consistent. SITFO evaluates each asset class against its own criteria, and labels investments in its own way. “We essentially want to take all of that information, structure it, and categorize it,” the team says.
And the team wanted a single home for that work: one platform the whole team could work in, covering the front end of the process from sourcing to the preliminary IC.
The solution
SITFO runs its manager research on V7 Go through an investment manager research (IMR) agent, built around the firm’s own framework.
It starts with the pitch book. A presentation is dropped into V7 Go, which classifies and categorises the fund the way SITFO labels investments, identifies the key data points and shows straight away whether the opportunity looks credible.
If it does, the team schedules a call with the manager. Meeting notes go into SITFO’s CRM, which is integrated with V7 Go, so everything in the CRM flows into the platform. The IMR agent gathers those files into a collection for that fund, then screens and scores it on every metric SITFO evaluates for that asset class.
Those criteria are specific. “In mining, for example, we have very specific things we’re looking for,” the team says. “If you identify it as X, then we’re looking for A, B, C and D.”
When a fund moves forward, the full data room is uploaded. Prompts and properties built into the IMR agent run across it and produce what SITFO calls its pre-mortem memo.
One fund in particular was a royalty-oriented strategy from a group the team didn’t know. V7 Go mapped it to SITFO’s framework, every check passed, and its objective score came out high relative to its peers.
The same platform now handles work well beyond screening:
LPA legal reviews
Populating subscription documents
Redlining NDAs
Reconciling transactions with SITFO’s custodian and performance vendor
The results
A data room review that took an analyst eight to 10 hours now produces a screening memo in 10 minutes or less.
SITFO has run roughly 100 of those memos in venture and a similar number in private equity buyout. Any inbound pitch deck can now be loaded straight into V7 Go and scored on how well it aligns with SITFO’s thesis for that asset class.
“Our top of funnel has increased dramatically,” the team says.
The bigger change is where the team’s time goes. With the first pass handled, the investment team is spending more time meeting managers firsthand.
“I think this has been a huge win for our team, is we’re dedicating more time to building relationships, as we want to meet these managers firsthand.”
Testimonial
SITFO
One platform for the whole team. SITFO wanted every team member working in the same tool. V7 Go covers finance and operations tasks, strategy and risk tasks and investment manager research in one place. “V7 Go is unique in the sense that we saw a differentiated approach,” the team says.
A workflow, not a chat window. The team needed a process that runs from the start of a project to the result. “It wasn’t a prompt and response. It was one succinct flow to get you from the start of a project to the end result.”
Built around SITFO’s own framework. The IMR agent classifies funds the way SITFO labels investments and checks each one against the criteria for its asset class. That gives every fund an objective score the team can compare with its peers.
For other investment teams weighing up AI, SITFO’s advice is short: “Don’t be shy. You’ll get left behind.”
