After helping build StepStone Group into one of the world’s largest private markets allocators, Brey Jones is launching a new firm with a very different blueprint.
His latest venture, Thirdpath, is betting that artificial intelligence can replace parts of the sprawling analyst armies and operational machinery long associated with private markets investing. By embedding engineers directly alongside investment professionals, the San Diego-based startup aims to automate sourcing, diligence and portfolio construction — while building bespoke portfolios for institutions, family offices and RIAs that increasingly want customization without the bureaucracy of giant platforms.
We spoke to Jones about his strategy and current thinking on today’s private capital markets.
Nearly two decades ago, Jones and several colleagues left Pacific Corporate Group, frustrated by what they viewed as broken promises regarding compensation and equity ownership.
The group went on to launch StepStone Group (STEP: Nasdaq) and built it into one of the world’s largest private markets allocators.
Now, after briefly retiring in his 40s following StepStone’s 2020 IPO, Jones is starting over again — this time with an artificial intelligence strategy driving an LP advisory model. Thirdpath has ambitious plans to grow into an asset manager by raising a GP stakes and seeding fund.
His new firm, Thirdpath, is built around a simple but increasingly popular idea: advances in AI and modern software infrastructure are beginning to erode the scale advantages that once favored sprawling asset managers with thousands of employees and massive operational teams.
Instead of replicating the traditional private markets playbook of building large analyst pools and data-entry operations, Thirdpath plans to hire engineers early and use AI tools to organize, process and surface the flood of unstructured information that drives private markets investing — everything from meeting notes and manager conversations to portfolio company updates and secondaries market intelligence.
“We have to be able to digest as much data as anybody else with a smaller team,” Jones says.
The strategy reflects how dramatically the private markets industry — and underlying technology supporting it — has changed since StepStone’s founding in 2007.
Back then, Jones says, building a scaled investment platform required years of expensive internal software development and large operational staffs to manually input and organize manager data. StepStone eventually employed dozens of coders and sizable data teams to build internal systems capable of tracking managers, analyzing performance and supporting client reporting.
Today, many of those core functions are commercially available through third-party software providers, allowing newer firms to focus their engineering resources elsewhere.
Thirdpath’s focus, Jones says, will instead center on using AI to sift through fragmented and often unstructured information flows in private markets and push potentially relevant insights directly to investment professionals in real time.
The firm is already recruiting engineers to work directly alongside investors in an effort to automate parts of the research and sourcing process that historically required large junior teams.
“A lot of investment professionals today still have to proactively sort through all of that information,” Jones says. “What if instead the relevant information just surfaced automatically in your inbox?”
The AI push comes as many private equity and private credit firms are only beginning to move from experimenting with generative AI tools to embedding them more deeply into investment workflows. Thirdpath co-founder John McGuinness says the technology remains imperfect but is already dramatically accelerating research, data analysis and internal decision-making processes.
“I feel like 2026 will be the year everybody adopted AI,” says McGuinness, who served as StepStone’s chief compliance officer and deputy general counsel.
Thirdpath is pitching itself as a new kind of private-markets allocator, built on the idea that artificial intelligence and off‑the‑shelf technology can deliver the scale and customization that once required sprawling teams and legacy systems.
Thirdpath is initially launching as a customized separate account manager focused on building tailored portfolios across buyout, venture, growth equity, credit and real assets for LPs. Unlike many larger private markets platforms, the firm does not currently operate flagship commingled funds, a structure Jones argues reduces conflicts of interest and allows the firm to customize co-investment and secondaries exposure for individual clients.
The launch comes as limited partners step up demand for bespoke SMAs and co‑investments, but increasingly lean on specialist advisors to structure and manage those complex mandates.
Thirdpath is targeting endowments, foundations, insurance companies and public pensions. There are also new opportunities with a growing number of family offices and wealth platforms seeking more sophisticated private market exposure, while struggling with the operational burdens of managing capital calls, distributions and direct investments.
“The amount of single-family offices that I’ve spoken to that are north of $5 billion is quite a bit,” Jones says. “Now we have single-family offices that are equal to public pension funds.”
The firm said its separate account minimum is roughly $100 million, a threshold it believes is necessary to achieve diversification in co-investments.
The firm eventually plans to expand into GP stakes and seeding strategies, creating what Jones describes as a connected ecosystem where advisory relationships, minority GP ownership stakes, co-investments and secondaries opportunities reinforce one another.
The broader thesis behind Thirdpath is that parts of private markets are becoming increasingly standardized as the industry consolidates around a handful of giant alternative asset managers.
“These large publicly traded private markets firms are all starting to look and feel very similar to one another,” Jones says. “Now their performance is starting to look and feel like one another.”
Thirdpath is betting there remains demand for something different: smaller, employee-owned investment firms using AI and modern infrastructure to compete with much larger incumbents while offering more customized portfolios and closer client relationships.
“We think there’s something great in being small and beautiful,” Jones says.
Jones’ email is [email protected].
