Alex Goodwin and Ayo Ekhator both know the messiness of private market data, having worked at top shops like Blackstone and Leonard Green before meeting up at Harvard Business School.

• Now they're building something to clean it up.
• And maybe to clean out some of the younger staffers who enter and analyze such data, first on the LP side and eventually on the GP side.

Driving the news: Bridge, developer of workflow automation software for private capital allocators, tells Axios that it's raised $5.1 million in seed funding led by Thicket Ventures.

• Other backers include current or former execs at firms like Morgan Stanley, Bain Capital, Dynasty, CD&R, and KKR.

Zoom in: Goodwin and Ekhator argue that much of private capital's liquidity problem is a really data problem, with LPs often unable to easily understand components and market values of their investments — thus restricting secondaries and related transactions.

• "This is about the second and third tier data which, if it's there, is buried on page 80 of a GP report," explains Ekhator. "We used to make these reports for our portfolios, and think they're kind of BS."
• Bridge ingests all of those documents, and eventually plans to leverage anonymized data from other clients to provide context. So far it has around $150 billion in assets across its customer base — many of whom are RIAs or multi-family offices — with Goodwin cautioning that it needs visibility into trillions of dollars before providing valid benchmarks.

The big picture: Part of the story here is just how the rapid growth of private capital is spawning a new cohort of tech-enabled service providers. And how the influx of retail investors will require different transparency and distribution tools.

• But another part is how such startups, including Bridge, threaten to replace the post-college crowd at investment firms, many of whom initially are tasked with advanced data entry. As with so many other white-collar industries, it's unclear what will happen to more senior roles when the junior pipeline is mothballed.
• Bridge's co-founders acknowledge that their early PE jobs might not exist in a few years, particularly at smaller firms. But they also believe the AI revolution could let new staffers get out of modeling earlier and into discussions with prospective investees, thus creating a younger generation of partners.

The bottom line: Private equity is funding its own disruption.

Redwood Materials, a Nevada-based battery recycling and grid storage firm, raised $350 million in Series E funding at a reported $6 billion valuation. Eclipse led with Nvidia participating as a new investor.

Why it's the BFD: The company is focused on both rare earth supply and powering AI data centers, two areas that have surged to the forefront of national security conversations.

• It's almost surprising that the White House didn't try to participate with an equity check.

The bottom line: "Redwood recently unveiled a new business to sell refurbished EV batteries as low-cost grid storage projects for uses like powering data centers. Second life grid storage projects can be significantly lower cost than new ones, with Redwood suggesting costs of between $100 and $200 per kilowatt hour vs. $200 to $500 per kilowatt hour. — Katie Fehrenbacher, Axios Pro

• Polymarket is having "early conversations" about raising new funding at between a $12b and $15b valuation, per Bloomberg.

• Polymarket founder and CEO Shayne Coplan joins us at Axios BFD on Nov. 18 in NYC.