Jan 2026 - Apr 2026
2 Months
Feb 2026 - Mar 2026
1 Product Designer (me)
1 Design Advisor
2 Product Managers
Scoping, Exploration, Research/Validation, Prototyping
INTRODUCTION
Fund of funds are complicated structures.
Capital activity involves complicated workflows.
So how can managers of Fund of Funds properly handle their capital?
Carta serves the private equity ecosystem by providing a robust fund administration platform. Fund managers log all of their fund’s activity on Carta and we help them keep track of performance, cash movement, and accounting.
However, there’s a special type of fund called a “Fund of Funds” — a fund that invests in other funds — and Carta had more trouble helping them, since the platform was not originally built around the way they operate.
But in Q1 2026, Carta decided to change that. We launched an updated product suite specifically for Fund of Funds — and I had the opportunity to design the updated capital activity dashboard as a product design intern.
Overview
CONTEXT
What's a Fund of Funds?
In general, a fund pools money from investors called limited partners (LPs). The fund is managed by general partners (GPs), who invest that money in various companies.
A Fund of Funds (FoF) is a specific type of fund - and it adds another layer. Instead of investing primarily in companies directly, a FoF invests in other funds, which then invest in companies.
PROBLEM
FoFs introduce another layer of complexity.
FoFs sit between their own investors and the funds they invest in, adding another layer for GPs to manage. Like any fund, a FoF collects capital from its LPs and distributes returns back to them. But it also sits on the other side of that relationship with its underlying funds: responding to their capital calls and receiving their distributions.
Fun fact: In addition to this cash flow problem, we identified was that FoFs have limited visibility into underlying investments. FoFs know which funds they invest in, but often have limited visibility into the companies those funds hold. Understanding their indirect exposure to a particular company depends on what underlying funds report, and I tackled this problem through designing for Carta's Visual Accounting tool.
PROBLEM
Capital activity for FoFs is a headache.
What’s capital activity?
Capital activity describes money moving between a fund and its investors:
Capital calls - when a fund asks its LPs to contribute a portion of the capital they’ve committed. LPs must respond to each call by sending the requested funds.
Distributions - when a fund returns capital or investment proceeds to its LPs.
For a traditional fund, GPs only manage this activity with their LPs. FoFs have to manage it on both sides: as a fund to their own LPs, and as an LP to the underlying funds they invest in.
This means tracking four types of activity:
Capital calls from fund investments
Distributions from fund investments
Capital calls to their LPs
Distributions to their LPs
SOLUTION
A capital activity dashboard for FoFs.
Carta already had a robust capital activity dashboard for traditional funds, allowing GPs to manage capital calls and distributions with their LPs. For FoFs, that only covered half the picture. They also needed to manage capital calls and distributions from the underlying funds they invested in.
My goal was to design a unified capital activity hub that brought both sides together.
I landed somewhere here…
GRAPH
Fund investment commitment
As a FoF manager, see how much you've committed to fund investments, and your contribution progress.
GRAPH
(Limited) Partner commitment
As a FoF manager, see how much your limited partners have committed to you, and their contribution progress.
TABLES
Capital calls & distributions for both Funds and LPs.
As a FoF manager, keep track of:
Capital calls received from your fund investments.
Distributions received from your fund investments.
Capital calls sent to your LPs.
Distributions sent to your LPs.
Four different tables, all in one place!
WHAT NOW?
V1 handed off, and in the pipeline to be built.
The above designs have been approved and will be added to the fund administration platform soon!
I also explored potential directions to take our V2, where we'll ideally include more insights & shortcuts. However, we're still missing some insight on what to prioritize foremost for FoF managers, so the next version will depend on feedback from V1!
Just for fun
Some snapshots
Full intern cohort @ our last social!
A birthday surprise from Sonia <3
My best latte art to this day
My end-of-internship presentation
Includes my goals/reflections of the entire term, and what I spent my 4 months doing!
PRODUCT THINKING
FULL PLATFORM
WEB APP
IN-DEPTH
BACK