How FundRM works

FundRM is a private, self-hostable CRM built for hedge fund managers and their investor-relations desks. It tracks companies, contacts, investors, meetings, documents, capital activity and AUM, and includes a full mailings/newsletter engine. What sets it apart is tenant-controlled encryption at rest: the fund — not the host — holds the key to its own data.

Cautious investment managers who need a real IR CRM but are uncomfortable putting their investor book in a multi-tenant cloud they don't control. If you'd rather run the system yourself, keep one database per fund, and be able to tell an LP exactly who can and cannot read your data, FundRM is aimed at you.

FundRM launches as a complete IR CRM with tenant-controlled encryption built in:

• Companies, contacts, investors and nominees
• Meetings, calls, notes and events
• Documents
• Capital activity, cash flows and market-value / AUM tracking
• A complete mailings stack — newsletters, weekly-return sends, contact lists, templates, a send queue and a per-recipient delivery log
• Encryption at rest with a per-fund key you unlock at login, one database per fund, blind-index search over encrypted fields, recovery keys, and data import/export

Staff authentication (sessions, with WebAuthn / passkeys) gates the app, and you unlock your fund's data with your passphrase to work.

Hosted: free to sign up and start using, with no strings, for your first month. After that it becomes payable on an honour system — we suggest a total of at least £5,000 a year (and, with a smile, we’d love £10,000). There’s no licence fee and no per-seat charge. It splits two ways: your fund donates at least half directly to charity — Sea Shepherd and/or the RSPCA, paid straight to the charity so it never passes through us — and pays FundRM only what it costs to run the service. The lower our running costs, the more goes to the charities, and we publish the donations.

Open source: prefer to run it yourself? Self-host FundRM on your own infrastructure in exchange for a one-time donation to charity (Sea Shepherd or the RSPCA), paid directly to the charity. To get it, email donation@fundrm.com or tick “Request the open-source version” in Settings. Either way your data stays portable — no lock-in.

Each fund has its own data key that encrypts the sensitive fields. That key is never stored in the clear — it is itself locked by your passphrase, so only the locked key and a salt sit on the server. When you unlock, your passphrase releases the data key into memory for the session, and encryption then happens transparently while you work. The security model page has the full detail.

For encrypted fields, an operator with root or a stolen backup sees only ciphertext. Encrypted today: company names, contact names, email subjects and bodies, contact phone numbers, contact and screening notes, and investor notes. Plaintext today (on the roadmap to encrypt): investor names, email addresses, and capital-activity amounts and allocations — for now an operator or stolen backup can read them. Row IDs, timestamps and status flags stay readable by design so the app can join and sort.

One honest caveat: while a session is unlocked, the key is in server memory, so a live compromise during that session can still reach plaintext. Encryption at rest narrows the window; it doesn't eliminate live-server risk.

If you lose the passphrase and every recovery share, your encrypted data is gone — we cannot reset it, and that impossibility is the feature, not a bug. To make it safe, a one-time recovery key is issued at onboarding (kept in your own vault) that can also unlock your data, and you re-enter it once to prove you saved it. An optional operator-escrow mode (off by default, contractual) exists for funds that prefer recoverability.

FundRM runs one separate database per fund (never co-mingled in shared tables), and each fund connects with its own least-privilege database account scoped to only that fund's database. So even a SQL flaw in one fund's session is refused at the database layer from reaching another fund's data. If you self-host, isolation is absolute: it's your server and your database.

Encrypting a column breaks ordinary search, so FundRM stores a keyed fingerprint (a "blind index") next to each searchable value. To search, the app fingerprints your query the same way and matches it, then decrypts the hits. This supports exact and prefix / typeahead lookups. Limits: no substring or full-text search inside encrypted fields, and identical values share a fingerprint — a well-understood trade-off.

Import: bring in investor positions and capital activity from spreadsheets, SFTP, or an administrator feed, reconciled into your investor records.

Export: because you run FundRM on your own MySQL 8 database, a complete, standard export is always available — a database dump is one command away, and no proprietary format stands between you and your data. Avoiding lock-in is a core principle.

Yes — self-hosting is the intended deployment. FundRM is plain PHP 8 under Apache with MySQL 8, with no build system and no mandatory external services. You load the schema into a database, set your configuration, and run it on infrastructure you control.

A fund is locked at rest — sensitive fields are ciphertext and no key is present. You unlock by entering your passphrase, which places the key in memory for the session; it re-locks on "Lock now", when the session expires or goes idle, or on server restart. While locked you can still sign in, but protected data is cryptographically unreadable, not just hidden. (One consequence: background email ingestion pauses while locked and catches up on next unlock.)

Stated plainly: encryption at rest is tenant-controlled (you hold the key), covering email content, contact and investor notes and phone numbers today, with more fields on the roadmap; isolation is a database-per-fund layout with a dedicated least-privilege database account per fund; and key loss means data loss by design. The usual hardening — TLS/HSTS, passkeys, rate-limiting, CSRF, and a per-tenant audit log — is part of the product. We don't claim certifications we don't hold. The security model page has the detail; ask us for the full architecture note.