The spreadsheet era
In early 2023, Allocator One's fund operations ran on Excel. Capital calculations in spreadsheets, investor reports in Word, NAV computations that took three people a full day to cross-check. Capital calls were manual. Compliance filings happened over email threads and shared drives.
Michael Ströck and his co-founder Felix Staeritz had been through this before. They'd built and exited startups, co-founded VC firms, raised small funds. Each time, same story: the enterprise fund administration platforms were built for billion-dollar institutions and priced accordingly. Everyone else got spreadsheets.
"We'd spend an entire day computing NAV for a single fund. Three people in a room, cross-referencing Excel tabs, hoping nobody had fat-fingered a formula. That's not a system, that's a liability."
— Michael Ströck, CEO & Co-Founder — Allocator One
The breaking point was scale. Allocator One was not backing one or two managers. It was building a platform to anchor dozens of funds at once, across jurisdictions, in different vehicle types, all needing real-time visibility into capital positions and compliance status. Excel does not scale to thirty concurrent funds. Neither do most fund administrators.
The thesis that demanded infrastructure
Allocator One starts from a simple observation: the funding market for first- and second-time fund managers is broken. Institutional capital access depends on whether large sovereigns happen to run relevant programs in a given year. The managers with the sharpest edges, founder-operators and domain specialists who've spent 10-15 years building conviction in a specific sector, struggle most to get institutional backing for their first fund.
Allocator One was designed to fix that. The firm focuses on what it calls "super-emerging" managers: Fund I and Fund II vehicles under $50 million, built by people founding firms from scratch. Not Fund IV managers with $300 million in AUM who happen to call themselves "emerging." First-generation fund builders.
The selection process is intense. Out of about 800 applications a year, the team talks to around 300 candidates. The investment rate is 3%. Allocator One covers an estimated 80% of sub-$50 million Fund I and II vehicles worldwide. That kind of coverage needs real operations underneath it.
"Those who pick their strategy well, move quickly, and manufacture momentum can get onto the right startup cap tables even if nobody knew their name two years earlier. Our job is to find those people and give them the infrastructure to execute."
— Michael Ströck, CEO & Co-Founder — Allocator One
But here's the thing: anchoring a fund is not writing a cheque. It means fund formation, legal review, investor onboarding, capital calls, distributions, multi-currency accounting, regulatory filings, and ongoing administration. For every fund. At the same time. Multiply that by thirty funds across nine countries and you have an operational surface area that can't be managed with headcount alone.
Why Infra One exists
The decision to build Infra One was not a diversification play. It was a necessity.
When you anchor 20+ funds as lead LP and provide formation services for many more, you cannot rely on third-party administrators who treat you as one client among hundreds. Week-long turnaround times don't work when managers are waiting to close their first capital call. Generic compliance workflows break when your portfolio spans US LLCs, Austrian GmbHs, Luxembourg SCSps, Cayman exempted limited partnerships, and Singapore VCCs, sometimes in the same quarter.
Infra One was built because Allocator One's thesis required it. The platform is written in Elixir, chosen because fund administration is a concurrent problem: dozens of funds, hundreds of investors, thousands of transactions running in parallel, all requiring isolation from each other.
"Fund administration is a concurrent problem. If a calculation error in Fund A can cascade into Fund B, you have a systemic risk that no amount of manual reconciliation can catch. We needed process-level isolation. The BEAM virtual machine gives us that at the infrastructure layer."
— Michael Ströck, CEO & Co-Founder — Allocator One
The technical architecture uses event-sourcing: every transaction is captured as an immutable event, and current state is derived by replaying those events. That gives regulators the complete audit trail they require, and gives the team the ability to recompute historical state when corrections are needed. In a multi-jurisdiction, multi-currency environment, retroactive adjustments are routine. Being able to replay and recalculate cleanly is not optional.
What Infra One handles
Infra One is not a vendor for Allocator One. It's the layer the entire business runs on.
Fund formation. Entity creation, legal documentation, and regulatory registration across nine jurisdictions. A typical fund launch takes one to three weeks, compared to the two-to-four-month industry standard.
Fund administration. Capital calls, distributions, fee calculations, waterfall computations, investor allocations. All processed in real time, not overnight batches.
Accounting and NAV. Multi-currency, multi-entity accounting with real-time NAV calculations. What used to take three people and a full day now updates continuously.
Investor services. KYC/AML onboarding, subscription documents, investor portal access, ongoing reporting. At Allocator One's scale, each anchored fund brings its own LP base needing independent onboarding.
Compliance and regulatory filings. Jurisdiction-specific reporting, with dedicated modules for each legal framework instead of a single abstraction. Multi-currency support alone took months of engineering. Currency conversion is not a presentation concern; it's fundamental accounting logic that compounds across every calculation.
Backbone. The technology layer that ties it all together. Real-time dashboards, automated workflows, data integrity across the full portfolio.
Everything runs on one platform. Every fund, every SPV, every capital call, distribution, and regulatory filing.
The dual-platform model
The relationship between Allocator One and Infra One is structural, not incidental. Allocator One provides the capital and manager selection. Infra One provides the execution infrastructure. Neither works without the other.
That split shows up in every product Allocator One offers:
GP1 Seed gives new managers $1M to $5M in working capital to hire their team and cover compliance before management fees kick in. The Standardized Manager Seed Note structures the investment across three lifecycle phases: a yield tranche during survival, carry participation during growth, and a fixed equity stake at maturity. The fund-level mechanics (fee calculations, revenue share distributions, carry allocations) are all administered on Infra One.
GP1 Commit finances the GP's required 2-5% fund commitment without personal recourse, lending against the LP interest itself via a standardized legal framework. The UCC Article 8 control agreements, security assignments, and registrar filings across common law and civil law jurisdictions are managed through Infra One.
Alpha Protocol handles co-investment. When an Allocator One GP sources a Series A or B deal, the firm can co-invest alongside the fund through a dedicated SPV. Compliance, cap table management, investor reporting, formation: all handled by Infra One, typically within days.
Time Machine is the most operationally complex product: a dual-pricing SPV structure that provides seed-level allocations inside later-stage deals. The GP leads a £2M SPV powered by Allocator One capital, with the GP's £200K portion priced at seed to create immediate TVPI uplift. SPV formation, compliance, cap table management, wiring, and dual-pricing mechanics all run on Infra One. Each Time Machine deal requires a standalone vehicle with its own investor onboarding, regulatory filings, and ongoing administration.
"Every product we've built at Allocator One has an Infra One dependency. Not because we wanted to create that dependency, but because it's genuinely impossible to run these structures at scale without a real-time, multi-jurisdiction operations platform underneath them."
— Michael Ströck, CEO & Co-Founder — Allocator One
Operating at scale
The numbers make the point.
Allocator One deploys €38.4M annually across 25 VC funds, €36.8M across 7 buyout funds, and €51.2M across 14 SPV deals. Combined run rate: over €125M. The average SPV closes in 18 days. Each vehicle requires its own formation, administration, compliance, and reporting workflow.
None of this can be done manually. On any given day, Infra One is processing capital calls in Austria, managing distributions in the Cayman Islands, running KYC workflows in Singapore, computing NAV across currencies, and generating regulatory filings for half a dozen jurisdictions. All at once. Each fund is isolated within the platform, so an error in one cannot propagate to another. But the team still sees everything from a single view.
Backbone gives Allocator One real-time visibility into every fund: capital deployed, outstanding commitments, fee schedules, compliance deadlines, portfolio performance. When a GP calls with a structuring question, the team can pull up the relevant fund data, model scenarios, and respond within hours instead of waiting for quarterly reports to be compiled.
The GP community effect
One thing nobody planned: the GPs on Infra One started sharing deals with each other. When thirty-plus fund managers are on the same infrastructure, with the same team supporting them, people start talking.
A deep-tech manager in Vienna surfaces a fintech deal that's outside their thesis; it gets routed to a fintech-focused GP in London who's also on the platform. A manager in Singapore flags a European expansion opportunity for a portfolio company; the Infra One team connects them with a GP who has relevant LP relationships on the continent. These introductions happen because the operational team has visibility across the full portfolio.
For Allocator One's thesis (that the best emerging managers are systematically underserved), this compounds the value of the anchor cheque. GPs don't just get capital and administration. They get a peer network of managers who went through the same selection process, all running on the same infrastructure.
Where it stands
None of this is theoretical. It's a live system: €125M in annual deployment, 30+ funds, nine jurisdictions, 800 GP applications a year.
The trajectory from spreadsheets to this point took about two years. Past a certain scale, operational infrastructure stops being a cost center and becomes the product. Allocator One can anchor a first-time GP in Vienna, structure a dual-pricing SPV in London, finance a GP commitment in New York, and seed a new manager in Singapore, all in the same quarter. None of that works without the platform underneath it.
"We didn't build Infra One because we wanted to be in the fund administration business. We built it because our thesis was impossible to execute without it. It turned out that if we needed it, so did every other emerging manager in the market."
— Michael Ströck, CEO & Co-Founder — Allocator One
