How Andrena Replaced Manual LP Check-Ins with Real-Time Visibility through bunch

Andrena Ventures is a London-based, solo GP fund founded in 2024 by Gideon Valkin. Before launching Andrena, Gideon spent time as a startup operator, holding commercial leadership roles at Monzo and ClearScore, before moving into venture at Entrée Capital. Andrena reached the first close of its €13M debut fund in April 2024, backed by founders and operators, financial service CEO’s, emerging manager fund of funds and VC leaders including: co-founders of Wise and Teleport, Emergence Ventures (FoF) GPs at a16z,Cherry Ventures,

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The fund invests at pre-seed and seed, typically writing €100,000 to €400,000 checks into rounds often led by others. Gideon is sector agnostic and focuses on sourcing the most talented founders that come out, directly or indirectly, from his core ecosystem which is Europe's key fintech alumni networks, Gideon’s dual background as both founder and investor shaped how he approached fund operations from the outset: not as a back office function to defer, but as infrastructure that determines how much of his time goes to LPs and portfolio companies versus admin.

Andrena's operations needed three things from a fund administrator: cost that worked for their GP-fund structure; service responsive enough to resolve issues without delay; and a digital product that let Gideon and his LPs self-serve rather than route every request through a person.

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No provider offered all three at once. The initial choice favoured service and cost over product, working with a traditional administrator before bunch. The gap showed up immediately in LP onboarding, which ran entirely on manual follow-up.

Gideon had already met bunch before founding Andrena, and once bunch was licensed to operate in the UK – the migration happened quickly after based on:

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1. Economics built for a solo GP: Cost was appropriate for a small, single-GP fund, without trading  service or product to get there
2. Responsiveness: Direct access to someone who could resolve an issue, rather than working through layers of a traditional administrator.‍
3.  A self-serve product: A digital platform that removed Gideon's dependency on a person for every answer, and gave his LPs the same.
4. ‍Cultural alignment: Gideon frames this as more than a preference; "I like that bunch is the type of company that I would back as an investor. When I deal with bunch, I can feel that entrepreneurial energy. Everyone's ambitious and wants to improve and build."

The clearest before and after sits in LP onboarding. Where the previous process required daily calls to track status, there’s now direct visibility.

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"Having the LP onboarding product was a game changer, to have visibility on where all the LPs were exactly in their process. I could just log on, see what was happening, and nudge accordingly." — Gideon Valkin,  Founder at Andrena

Capital calls follow the same pattern: visibility on where each process stands removes most of the admin that used to sit in following up. Investor reporting has moved from a manual, requested exception to something bunch produces directly. 

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The self-serve model has changed the dynamic with LPs too, not just for Gideon himself:

"For most LPs, being able to self-serve any documentation involved with the fund is a good thing. It's a win-win-win. It saves the LP time, it saves me time, and it saves bunch time."— Gideon Valkin,  Founder at Andrena

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Consolidating fund administration alongside tax and accounting through bunch's partner network has also reduced Andrena's vendor count from three relationships to one, a structural change Gideon considers essential to running a fund solo.

With Fund I fully closed and Fund II expected next year, attention is already turning to where the current setup will need to hold up under more volume, not just more LPs. Andrena is expected to eventually grow past a one-person team, at which point multiplayer functionality on bunch becomes relevant in a way it isn't yet today. The tax and accounting consolidation already underway through bunch's partner network is, in his framing, a preview of the single-relationship model he wants as the fund scales across multiple vehicles.