How Passion Capital cut reporting time by two thirds on bunch

Passion Capital has been writing first cheques in London since 2011. European seed at the time was dominated by investors who had never built a company, so Passion assembled a partnership of operators instead and became the first operator-led fund in Europe, publishing its terms in plain English and committing to stay at the earliest stage rather than following its winners upmarket.

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The record since then runs to 118 companies backed and five fintech unicorns, including Monzo, GoCardless and Tide, making Passion one of Europe's most prolific fintech unicorn creators. The returns are tangible, with 31 exits, a net IRR of 23%, 2.5x DPI, and £67M distributed to LPs in 2025, more than the size of any fund the firm has raised. In April 2026 Passion closed Fund IV at £43m including two SPVs, backed entirely by private capital, and has already invested in 13 companies from it.

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By the time Fund IV arrived, Passion was running fifteen years of investor records, reporting and accounting across four fund generations at completely different stages of life, without ever having used a fund administrator.

For most of its history Passion ran its back office itself, and quarterly reporting for the first two funds was assembled by hand across linked spreadsheets and Word templates. The numbers had to be reconciled manually before anything could go out, and when something did not tie, the mismatch had to be hunted down line by line through a fund of tens of millions.

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The templates behind those reports had not been touched in a decade, and underneath sat the accounting, held in Excel workbooks patched so many times that every quarter began by working around the same known problems rather than fixing them.

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The turning point came just after the first close of Fund IV, which was going to be significantly larger by LP count than anything before it, and a new partnership had brought in investors who were already used to logging into a portal elsewhere. Continuing with spreadsheets and attachments through an active fundraise was not an option, though changing systems between closes meant ironing out creases while the pressure was already on, which the team would do differently given the choice again.

Since Passion had never bought fund administration before, cost mattered and bunch was competitive, but the real risk was spending budget on a platform that investors would reject.

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Two things settled it:

• The first was the product itself. Several of the alternatives felt dated, with information buried behind dropdowns, which is a problem when you are introducing a portal to investors who did not ask for one. bunch was immediately legible, and that lowered the cost of adoption before a single LP logged in.
• The second was the flexibility. The other platforms offered limited room to shape either the product or the commercial terms, whereas bunch could accommodate four funds, SPVs and co-invests at different stages of life, each carrying operational complexities that no standard configuration was going to anticipate.

Every Passion vehicle now runs on bunch, which puts fifteen years of fund history in one place, a one stop shop for all the investors. 

For Fund III and IV, Passion's most recent funds, reporting is where the difference shows most clearly. Producing a quarterly report by hand meant collecting data from every active portfolio company, writing the portfolio updates founders, rebuilding the numbers across linked workbooks and reconciling them before anything could go out, which for Fund III alone took four days to compile the data into the reporting template, never mind gathering the data. 

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Now, the process and format is fixed. Passion simply shares the valuations, updates and accounting with the bunch team, who take care of the rest. The investors now know what the report will look like, where to find it on bunch. Each quarter looks like the last and they can even find the key KPIs summarised on the platform pulled directly from the report. Across the estate the team estimates that running every fund the old way would take roughly three times as long as it does now with bunch.

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That consistency extends to the funds bunch does not administer, since Passion rebuilt its own legacy templates for Funds I and II using bunch's reports as the reference, and those reports now go out 15 days ahead of deadline.

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"The biggest thing we've gained is not having to worry so much about human mistakes. The amount of times I've sent something and thought, did I just attach the right thing? With bunch, if something were ever to go out incorrectly, you can stop it, work out what happened and relaunch. It's rare, but at least we have that control." — Fern Scott, Operations Lead, Passion Capital

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For the investors who have backed Passion since Fund I, the records that were split across email and a portal depending on which fund they were asking about now sit together, from subscriptions and drawdowns through to quarterly reports and eventually distributions. This has reduced investor-related admin queries for Passion giving them time back to communicate the important things, , because what they are looking for is already on bunch sitting right in their Data room.

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Sending tax statements and distribution notices once meant moving the same documents across several tools, with a manual check at every step to confirm the right file had reached the right investor. For the newer funds that work has gone, and where a document needs to be updated post-sharing, access can be withdrawn and updated in seconds.

Passion's growth fund will be the first vehicle, outside SPVs and funds, where bunch is in place from day one of the fund lifecycle. Every fund before it has been migrated and involved introducing a portal to investors who had already been onboarded another way, which means working against habit, whereas this one starts with it That fund is aimed squarely at institutional LPs, which is where the platform now has to hold its own. Institutional behaviour today is mixed, with some investors still asking for everything by email while others, including one of Passion's largest backers, use the portal daily and come to the team if they need support – which is the behaviour Passion wants across the base.