Private capital firms manage trillions in assets, but their operating model has not evolved and remains stuck in tools that were not built for purpose.
Dealstack, a platform founded by former Kirkland & Ellis Partner Joel Arnell and ex-Oaktree Capital investor Seb Lapinski, is changing that.
“Private equity is full of brilliant people working with ancient tools” said Seb Lapinski, co-founder and COO. “We built Dealstack because highly qualified professionals shouldn’t be stuck copying and pasting data from spreadsheets to PDFs when AI and automated workflows can do that for them.”
Dealstack automates important workflows – including valuation waterfalls, employee equity and ownership tracking, structure charts, contract management and more – all within a single, structured platform, built specifically for private capital. The result: faster execution, real-time collaboration, and better data, producing significant time and cost savings.
In just two years, Dealstack has been adopted by:
- 30+ private capital firms representing $2.6 trillion in AUM.
- 6 of the Top 10 global private capital firms by funds raised, and 8 of the Top 10 in Europe.
- 7 of the Top 10 global law firms by deal value, and 9 of the Top 10 in Europe.
The company has received investment from current and former senior professionals at Paul Weiss, Kirkland & Ellis, Latham & Watkins, KKR, CVC, TA Associates, and Goldman Sachs, among others.
“As M&A lawyers and investors, we’ve lived these inefficiencies first-hand” added Joel Arnell, co-founder and CEO. “We built a platform designed specifically for private capital to automate the highly manual workflows that prevail. The broad backing from leading industry figures show we are on the right track.”
The missing layer to unlock AI in private capital operations
The promise of AI has not translated into real world utility within the private capital industry. Data tenancy and security, coupled with concerns around hallucination and model specificity, have proved a near insurmountable block for even early adoption of this technology in private capital, where the high regulatory environment and complex problem space compound these issues.
The last-mile delivery of AI applications must be perfect. Generically trained models will never work in an industry built on private data and distinct working methods. Dealstack automates many of these operational tasks, giving time back to investors to concentrate on their core activity – investing.
Dealstack’s private capital data model is unique to each customer and is the basis upon which the AI is built to connect all the dots – every person, entity, legal agreement, and ownership position. It provides clarity and consistency in the complex ownership and waterfall structures of private capital, whilst improving legal and regulatory compliance.
An ontology that, for the first time, brings the power of AI to private capital operations. Today, augmenting the work of lawyers, investment professionals and administrators, tomorrow becoming entirely agentic and handling tasks end to end.
Dealstack offers:
- A unified private capital ontology which maps the legal, financial, and ownership relationships.
- A single, auditable view of the legal truth.
- The key to reliable AI-powered agentic workflows.
AI in private capital depends on data that is clean, connected, and trusted. Dealstack is building the infrastructure to make that possible.
