About Arcola
Arcola is a private equity fund based in the Netherlands, managed by three partners. As a new, growing firm, they specialize in managing M&A deal flow, investments, and relationships with advisors and Limited Partners (LPs).
The Challenge
As Arcola established its investment operations, the partners recognized that managing deal flow through cloud storage and email was a temporary solution. To support their sophisticated investment process, they needed to evolve into a centralized, intelligent infrastructure.
Centralizing Deal Intelligence: Relying on OneDrive for deal management meant that critical documents like teasers and IMs were isolated from deal context. The team needed a unified environment where documents, stakeholder communications, and deal stages lived side-by-side for instant retrieval.
Accelerating Investment Review: Analyzing comprehensive 50-page teasers is a time-intensive process. The partners sought to leverage technology to streamline this initial review, allowing them to focus their time on evaluating high-priority opportunities rather than manual data extraction.
Structuring the Deal Lifecycle: While the investment thesis was clear, the operational process needed a digital backbone. The firm wanted to implement a systematic M&A pipeline to visualize deal progression from initial sourcing to NBOs in real-time, ensuring rigorous tracking for every opportunity.Our Approach
We designed and built a new Attio workspace from the ground up, creating a custom-tailored system to manage their unique deal flow.
Methodology: We built a custom M&A deal pipeline. When a new teaser arrives, a deal is created, and an automated workflow builds a new folder structure in OneDrive, with dedicated subfolders for that teaser.
The Stack: We configured their Attio workspace and used n8n to build a custom integration with OneDrive and OpenAI.
Data & Automation: The biggest achievement is an AI workflow using n8n. This workflow takes 50-page teaser documents from OneDrive, uses AI to automatically generate a 1-page summary, and saves the partners hours of reading time.
The Results
The new Attio workspace provides Arcola with the structure and automation needed to manage their deal flow and scale their operations.
A Central Source of Truth: All deal, company, and document information is now centralized, providing a complete and unified view of their operation.
Massive Time Savings: The AI-powered teaser summaries save the partners hours of manual reading for every single deal, a huge time-saving attribute.
Enhanced Pipeline Visibility: The structured M&A pipeline provides clear, real-time visibility into every stage of their deal flow.
Why It Matters
For a new private equity firm, running on shared drives isn't a scalable strategy. Building a custom CRM from day one provides the structured process and automation needed to manage a complex deal pipeline and set a foundation for growth.
Ready to build a CRM that’s custom-tailored for your investment process? Book a Free Consultation Call with Us Today - Link.