Family Offices Seek Tailored Products and Pool Their “Collective Firepower” for Direct Deals

The forum, The Cercle: Future of Finance, Singapore Family Office Forum, was organised by The Cercle, an invitation-only private capital investment club, and gathered 60 family office principals, sovereign allocators and institutional leaders. Companies such as Agentic Funds, an AI-driven quantitative hedge fund, BTC Now, a Bitcoin structured products platform, and Pogum, a bilateral lending platform, are tailoring solutions to family offices.

Sam Chowdhury, founder and chief investment officer of Agentic Funds, said family offices look for opportunities that fit a “3L” framework of lifestyle, legacy and liquidity. They often have two segments with different aims: the patriarch, who generally wants capital preservation, liquidity and no management fee, and the next generation, which wants real exposure to AI rather than just a stake in AI start-ups. Unlike conventional venture capital or private equity funds that are driven by internal rates of return, family offices usually operate under a strict capital preservation mandate.

A fifth-generation principal from a Dubai-based family office described a three-step filter for deals: “Why should we not do it, should we do it, and lastly, how much?” Co-investing with peers gives reassurance by distributing risk, he said, noting that wealth erosion in family offices has historically stemmed from real estate misallocation, disputes over wealth division among heirs, and complex cross-border tax liabilities. His family office has 100 members across nine nationalities and 22 residency jurisdictions, which means constantly adapting to changing trust regulations and ultimate beneficial owner disclosure rules.

Sourcing remains hard. Direct deal sourcing is fragmented and time-consuming, and one family office adviser warned that many direct deal proposals end up being a “waste of time” because of counterparty risks and unverified buyers. Chinese investors traditionally prefer to source independently, but partnering with general partners has become essential for complex cross-border tech investments. A Hong Kong-based adviser said an AI platform cut the time to decide on an investment from two weeks to between three and five days. An investment lead at a US-based family office said secondary-market deal sourcing is slow, forcing her team to build dedicated networks with general partners.

As family offices become more institutional, the community is also coming together to seek deals once available only to institutions, by combining a pool of funds. Noelle Reno, founder of The Cercle, said the family office world is applying co-investing behaviour to frontier technologies, taking signals from peers, sharing allocations and helping each other with due diligence and underwriting. This “collective firepower” would let family offices negotiate directly with target companies, she said.