Inside Hanover Park: Building an AI-Native Service Business, Growing to $15B in Assets
The Peel with Turner Novak
Turner Novak
4.6 • 11 Ratings
🗓️ 18 March 2026
⏱️ 72 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Chris Hladczuk is the Co-founder and CEO of Hanover Park, the AI-native fund administrator, vertically integrating fund administration, portfolio management, and LP experience for finance and investment teams.
Chris is the 2nd ever returning guest of the show, and is fresh off announcing Hanover’s $27m Series A. We go inside the round, their explosive growth, why they built their own general ledger from scratch, and how that enabled them to build incredible AI products for investment firms that touch over $100 trillion in assets.
Thanks to Sahil Bloom, and Chad + Pratyush at Susa for help brainstorming topics for this conversation.
Thank you to Numeral and Flex for supporting this episode.
Try Numeral, the end-to-end platform for sales tax and compliance: https://www.numeral.com
Sign-up for Flex Elite with code TURNER, get $1,000: https://form.typeform.com/to/Rx9rTjFz
Timestamps:
(0:37) Financial infrastructure for investment firms
(1:35) Hanover Park’s $27m Series A
(5:30) AI-enabled services businesses
(9:07) Productizing the service layer
(11:30) Helping CFO’s and investors use AI
(13:46) Building a general ledger from scratch
(18:03) Compete against companies with IT departments
(19:55) Hiring in an unsexy industry
(21:30) Live in constant paranoia of your customers
(25:19) Gongs, music in the office, blizzard commutes
(28:54) Friday night hackathons
(30:54) Automating onboarding and manual admin work
(35:05) Real-time visibility on all data
(38:07) Always get on the plane
(40:36) Turning customers into raving fans
(43:45) Using polite persistence in sales
(47:36) How to master founder-led content
(51:29) 99% of advice is wrong in AI era
(54:21) Importance of one-way vs two-way doors
(56:11) Growing from VC into PE and Private Credit
(1:00:36) When to turn down new customers
(1:02:22) Becoming a customers most important vendor
(1:04:00) Chris’ personal AI stack
(1:07:41) Hanover Park’s MCP
Referenced
Try Hanover Park: https://www.hanoverpark.com/
Careers at Hanover Park: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/hanover-park
First episode with Chris: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lomqcrFNv8
Artie: https://www.artie.com/
Episode with Jacqueline @ Artie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fd1YKsBaq0
Granola: https://www.granola.ai/
Claude Cowork: https://claude.com/product/cowork
HubSpot: https://www.hubspot.com/
Attio: https://attio.com/
Monaco: https://www.monaco.com/
Follow Chris
Twitter: https://x.com/chrishlad
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-hladczuk-b09204153
Follow Turner
Twitter: https://twitter.com/TurnerNovak
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/turnernovak
Subscribe to my newsletter to get every episode + the transcript in your inbox every week: https://www.thespl.it/
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Chris, welcome to the Peel. |
| 0:04.6 | We're back. |
| 0:05.8 | The second ever second time guest. |
| 0:09.0 | First one was Dan at Chainguard, which they went zero to 40 in revenue in two years. |
| 0:14.1 | Those are big shoes to fill. |
| 0:15.2 | I know. |
| 0:16.1 | We went zero to 15 billion in under two years, 20 months to be exact. |
| 0:19.8 | So we're going. |
| 0:20.5 | 15 billion in revenue? No, that would be a exact. So we're going. 15 billion in revenue. |
| 0:22.1 | That would be a lot. That would be a lot of revenue. I'm not cursor assets on platform. |
| 0:27.4 | As on platform. Okay. So for someone who isn't familiar with Hanover Park, they didn't listen to the |
| 0:31.8 | first one, which will link in the show notes for people if they want to listen to the year old |
| 0:36.3 | conversation. What is Hanover Park |
| 0:38.6 | for people who don't know? You can think about us as financial infrastructure for the investment |
| 0:42.0 | firm. And so today there's like all these insane armies of human duct tape, we call it, that |
| 0:47.2 | sticks together all the back and middle office to do all the financial reporting for the limited |
| 0:51.8 | partners of these firms, for the CFOs, and all that kind of stuff. |
| 0:54.4 | And what we've built is like unified software plus AI plus services to do all the financial |
| 1:00.1 | reporting, which would be called fund administration. |
| 1:02.6 | And then we also have a bunch of portfolio management monitoring tools and kind of like our |
| 1:07.1 | thesis is that, you know, B2B SaaS is dead, which I said literally on this podcast a year and a half ago, that's come true with Claude. |
| 1:14.5 | These like thin layers on top of data that you don't own are things that are being disrupted. |
... |
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