A summary of our April 22 webinar: DealCloud with Celeste — AI purpose-built for private capital
The conversation around AI in private capital has shifted. It’s no longer a question of whether to adopt it — it’s a question of whether the AI you’re using actually understands how your firm works. If you missed our webinar, or want a quick recap, here are the five things that matter most.
1. Access to AI is a commodity. What sets firms apart is AI that knows your firm.
Anyone can open a browser and use the same general-purpose AI tools your competitors are using — which means access to AI alone is no longer an advantage. The firms that build durable competitive advantage are those whose AI understands their deals, their relationships, their investment history, and their governance obligations, not just general market data.
That’s the foundation Intapp DealCloud is built on. Celeste is native to DealCloud, which means it draws on your firm’s proprietary data — deal records, relationships, historical decisions, and operates within the permissions and information barriers you’ve already established. Your firm’s institutional memory becomes something AI can actually act on, rather than something that lives scattered across inboxes, documents, and people’s heads.
2. The four skill sets that define private capital success are all ready for AI augmentation.
The best private capital professionals compete on four dimensions: relationships, quantitative analysis, qualitative judgment, and governance. For years, AI couldn’t meaningfully touch any of them in a context-aware, firm-specific way. That’s changed.
Across the full investment lifecycle — fundraising, deal origination, value creation, and exit — each of these areas is now a viable target for meaningful efficiency gains. Relationship intelligence can be scored and surfaced proactively. Valuation models and portfolio KPIs can be generated and updated in real time. Diligence workflows, IC documentation, and contract risk flagging can be accelerated significantly. Compliance monitoring and ESG reporting can run continuously rather than periodically. Because DealCloud maps directly to these workflows, the augmentation happens where your teams already work — not in a separate tool that competes for adoption.
3. Manual data entry is a tax on your investment team’s time – and it’s now optional.
The live demo brought this into sharp focus. When a teaser arrives, the traditional workflow asks someone to read it, extract the relevant details, and manually populate a deal record — a process that is both time-consuming and prone to inconsistency. With Celeste inside DealCloud, that same workflow becomes: upload the document, describe what you need in plain language, review what Celeste has extracted, and approve it. The deal record is created without a single field entered manually.
The same applies to CIMs, meeting notes, and other deal documents throughout the origination process. DealCloud surfaces the relevant fields, holds them for your review, and writes nothing to the system until you’ve approved it — keeping your team in control while removing the administrative burden that has always sat between a document arriving and insight being actionable.
4. On-demand financial modelling is now a first-hour capability, not a days-long process.
One of the most compelling moments in the session was a preliminary LBO model generated in seconds directly from a CIM, without leaving DealCloud. For senior leaders, the significance isn’t the speed of the calculation — it’s what that speed changes about decision-making. When initial modelling is available the moment a deal arrives, your team reaches conviction faster, allocates attention more precisely, and can focus on the judgment calls that actually require human expertise rather than the groundwork that precedes them.
This is where the concept of operating leverage in private capital becomes tangible. As financial leverage becomes harder to extract as a differentiator, the firms that move faster and think more clearly about more opportunities — without proportionally growing their teams — are the ones that compound their advantage over time.
5. Governed AI isn’t a feature – it’s the precondition for using AI at all.
Private capital firms operate under compliance obligations that most industries never face: conflicts of interest, material non-public information, ethical walls, and independence requirements that are built into how the firm functions day to day. Most AI tools were never designed with any of this in mind, which is precisely why applying them in a regulated context carries real risk.
Celeste was built differently. Every interaction respects the permissions, access controls, and information barriers already configured in DealCloud, so LP data stays protected and the right people see the right information. For senior leaders evaluating AI adoption, this is the question that should come before all others: does this AI understand how a regulated firm operates? With DealCloud, that answer is yes — by design, not by workaround.
Watch the full session on demand
Everything covered in this webinar is available today. Watch the full recording on demand to see the live demo and hear the detail behind each of these capabilities — and if you’d like to explore what this looks like for your firm specifically, request a demo.