Built by someone who has seen the problem from every seat.
PROVEN exists because financial decisions in private markets are routinely made on numbers that have never been independently reconstructed from source. It is built by a team that has lived that problem from every angle — auditor, CFO, institutional investor, operator.
This is an infrastructure problem, not a reporting problem.
For twenty years, private markets have relied on a simple working assumption: that the financial reports produced by portfolio companies can be trusted, verified periodically by sampling, and used as the basis for decisions measured in the tens and hundreds of millions of dollars.
That assumption was always imperfect. At today's scale of private capital — and under today's regulatory and LP expectations — it is no longer tenable. The verification layer that private markets need does not exist yet. PROVEN is being built to be that layer.
The conviction behind PROVEN is not that management reporting is dishonest. It is that reporting is interpretive by nature — and the capital deployed against those interpretations has outgrown the margin of interpretation that was once acceptable.
John Cunningham
Founder, PROVEN
Mr. Cunningham has sat at every seat around the financial table. He began his career as a CPA and auditor at Deloitte, where he learned how financial statements are constructed, verified, and attested — and where he first encountered the structural limits of audit sampling.
At Knight Trading Group, the publicly traded market-making firm, Mr. Cunningham served as the SEC-licensed FINOP (Financial and Operations Principal) for two of the firm's broker-dealer subsidiaries — the regulator-accountable principal for the quarterly FOCUS Reports filed with the SEC. Few roles impose a higher standard of individual accountability for financial truth.
Following Knight, Mr. Cunningham co-founded his first institutional financial technology company alongside the founder of Knight Trading Group — building data and reporting infrastructure for the hedge fund industry. That experience was his first attempt to solve, through technology, the reporting rigor gap he had seen as an operator.
As CFO of Two Sigma, one of the most sophisticated institutional investors in the world, he worked directly with operators across PE and VC portfolio companies to improve their reporting to institutional standards. The experience surfaced a consistent pattern: the gap between what management reported and what the underlying financials actually showed was wider, and more consequential, than anyone was admitting.
He subsequently co-founded a second institutional financial technology company serving the hedge fund and asset management industries. PROVEN is the platform Mr. Cunningham wished existed at every seat he has occupied — built to solve, at institutional scale, the problem he has spent a career trying to solve one company at a time.
Big Four — Deloitte
Learned how financials are constructed, verified, and attested — and where audit sampling falls short by design.
Knight Trading Group
SEC-licensed principal for two broker-dealer subsidiaries — accountable for quarterly FOCUS Reports filed with regulators.
CFO, Two Sigma
Ran finance at a leading institutional investor and worked directly with portfolio-company operators on reporting rigor.
Two fintech companies
Built institutional-quality financial infrastructure twice, learning what solving this problem actually requires.
Assembling deliberately.
PROVEN is currently founder-led. The founding team and advisory board are being assembled — with the same discipline we apply to everything else. We would rather leave a seat open than fill it wrong.
We are selectively recruiting senior operators across engineering, data infrastructure, and institutional sales — individuals who have built financial technology at scale and understand what institutional buyers require.
We are assembling an advisory board of senior practitioners from PE, Private Credit, institutional audit, and regulatory practice — individuals whose perspective shapes both the product and the business.
Named advisors will be announced here as they join.
Where we are, and where we are going.
Pre-commercial
Actively engaging with pilot partners across PE, VC, and Private Credit.
P&L and cash flow
Independent reconstruction from source — the two statements where verification matters most.
North America & Europe
Built for institutional investors on both sides of the Atlantic from day one.
Early conversations shape what we build.
If you are a PE, VC, or Private Credit investor who believes source-verified financials would change how you diligence or monitor, we should talk.
A founder response within one business day.