1. Firstly, please could you introduce yourself, and LemonEdge?
I’m Gareth Hewitt, Co-Founder of LemonEdge, a fund accounting software. After two decades building fund accounting systems for private markets, I saw first-hand how legacy technology was holding teams back as the industry grew in complexity and scale.
LemonEdge is the modern fund accounting platform built to close that gap. Combining an event-driven accounting engine, advanced allocation logic, and control automation so fund managers and service providers can operate with speed, accuracy, and confidence.
2. Please could you tell us about your career path prior to joining LemonEdge?
I’ve spent my entire career building software for private markets at four different companies, two of which I’d co-founded. I started as a developer, had deep exposure to clients, moved through pre-sales, product and engineering leadership, and eventually led global teams building partnership accounting systems used by some of the world’s largest asset managers.
Across every role, one thing was constant: private markets is an industry incentivised towards complexity, and the legacy technology underpinning their back office operations wasn’t keeping up so everyone was doing their work offline in excel, or proprietary systems, and just uploading the results to these systems. The inefficiencies were everywhere and the opportunity to really create something different that could solve these problems was huge. These frustrations gave me the opportunity to build LemonEdge from the ground up, with the hindsight of the prior 20 years' experience to know how to build everything right.
3. Please could you provide a bit of background on your role as the Co-Founder of LemonEdge?
My focus is ensuring our technology stays ahead of the needs of a rapidly evolving industry and our teams are set up to deliver exceptional outcomes for customers.
That means balancing long-term product innovation with the operational priorities of scaling a global SaaS business: performance, reliability, customer success, hiring the right people and building an ecosystem of partners who can help us serve clients worldwide.
4. What do you think are the biggest opportunities for FinTechs in the UK?
The UK remains one of the most sophisticated financial markets in the world, fuelled by one of the best education systems – it’s full of sectors where infrastructure hasn’t kept pace with the demands of modern finance.
The biggest opportunity lies in solving real operational problems - the ones costing firms time, accuracy, transparency, and ultimately trust. FinTechs that can bring automation, auditability and intelligence into these high-value workflows that have a huge runway.
5. Conversely, what are the biggest challenges facing UK FinTechs?
Mainly institutional financial services firms find it hard to deal with startups. “No one gets fired for buying IBM” mentality is prevalent in a naturally risk averse industry. If you’re trying to improve back office functionality for these firms you can’t be incrementally better – you have to show 10x value to justify their engagement, and willingness to take a risk with a startup with critical back office tech.
6. As a software provider in the private markets sector, what trends do you expect to see in the next 12 months?
Four major shifts are accelerating:
- Increasing product diversity: Even if a PE firm had a traditional large buy out fund, the chances are now that they will have an evergreen vehicle, or private debt vehicle sitting alongside. Investors want views across these products which require multiple different systems right now.
- Private debt: Private debt, hybrid, collateralised loan obligations, or certain credit funds are huge growth areas that again require different systems, which right now are being solved by mashing three or more enterprise systems together and throwing bodies and excel at it.
- Demand for transparency: LPs and regulators are pushing for faster, deeper and more auditable data. Platforms with unified data models will be essential.
- AI that is genuinely safe and usable: Not generative hype. Back office systems have to be 100% correct, but embedding AI in these systems to help and guide users will improve workflow and provide 100% auditability in every calculation.
Overall, the theme is clear: complexity is rising, expectations are rising. The technology has to rise with it.
7. What advice would you give to businesses looking to update their tech stack?
Start by understanding what you’re trying to solve. High level that will be something like “I want to reduce the time it takes to produce investor reports from t+60 to t+20”.
Start by looking at where people are doing work manually outside of systems. Chances are Excel is being used at every step of your workflow and the systems you have are just record keeping systems where the actual work is being done offline. Reducing this will be your quickest path to those goals.
Looking for new platforms that have incremental gains isn’t good enough, it needs to be 10x to start automating all those manual, proprietary steps. It needs to be built for change: new asset classes, new regulations, new investor demands. The pace of private markets means your core system needs to evolve with you, not become the next bottleneck.
8. To end on a high, could you summarise your career highlight to date in no more than two sentences?
While we have a revolutionary disruptive product, what we’ve found also resonates strongly as a differentiator in the market is the team we’ve built. The fact we want to work with firms to solve their complex problems, and have the talented team to do so, is something our competitors stopped doing a decade ago and firms are excited to re-engage with us to help close the long-standing tech gap in private fund accounting.
9. How is the partnership between LemonEdge and Mishcon de Reya helping to drive growth by providing useful support and opportunities for LemonEdge
Jamie Nascimento, Co-Founder & CCO, LemonEdge
Our partnership with Mishcon de Reya has been instrumental as we scale. They understand the intersection of high-growth SaaS and the specialised world of private markets, which means they’re able to support us with exactly the right blend of legal precision and commercial pragmatism.
As we grow across the UK, US, UAE, and Europe, they’ve helped us create a legal and regulatory foundation that allows us to move quickly, structure enterprise deals effectively, and navigate increasingly complex data and compliance expectations from global asset managers.
What stands out most is their approachability and genuine investment in our success. They’re a team we can have open, commercially focused discussions with, experts who understand our vision, challenge our thinking where it matters, and make it easy to keep momentum. It feels like a true partnership, not just a service relationship