Walk a deal through Sherpa.

Sherpa OS runs the whole arc, in the order it happens. A thesis becomes a target, a target becomes diligence, diligence becomes a close, and a close becomes a hundred days that either deliver the thesis or don't. At every step, the person who owns it has a partner.

Sherpa starts with how your firm is actually built.

Before any deal work makes sense, Sherpa needs your shape, and Sherpa models the real one. Firm at the top, funds beneath it, holdcos under those, portcos at the leaves, with ownership percentage and investment date on every node. Not a folder structure pretending to be an org chart.

That matters more than it sounds. A deal happens at a portco, but its synergies belong to a fund's returns and its risk belongs to the firm. Because Sherpa knows which portco sits under which holdco under which fund, everything the work produces finds the right level on its own. The work happens at the bottom. The picture assembles at the top.

Sherpa firm structure for private equity: firm, fund, holdco, portco

Your principal gets a partner who works the pipeline.

Every good acquisition starts with a point of view about what you're looking for. Sherpa holds that thesis as a live object rather than a slide from last year's offsite, and Henry works the pipeline against it, surfacing the targets that actually fit and flagging the ones that only look like they do.

He's reading your whole portfolio while he does it, so "does this fit" means fit with what you already own, not fit on paper. When a target survives that screening, you take it forward and the deal begins.

Your diligence lead gets a counterpart who's read everything.

Dewey files every document the second it lands, into a canonical fourteen-domain structure nobody has to maintain. He reads them properly, too, with a layout-aware model, so tables, financials, and cap tables survive intact instead of collapsing into a wall of characters.

Adrian reads all of it. Ask him a question and the answer comes from what's actually in the documents, retrieved by meaning rather than keyword, with the source cited. He'll surface the right clause before an analyst finds the right folder. And every answer respects who's asking: retrieval honors folder permissions and tier limits, so sensitive material never turns up for someone who shouldn't have it.

Two more things that matter when this is under pressure. Every document is virus scanned, and anything that isn't clean can't be opened or downloaded. And the structure Dewey builds here is the same structure the integration plan inherits at close, so nothing gets rebuilt the week after signing.

AI-native M&A data room with automated diligence structure

AI diligence software answering questions from the source documents

Day 1 is a deadline, not a milestone.

Signing and closing are where an integration is won or lost, because everything you didn't sequence in advance arrives at once. Systems access, banking, contract novation, payroll, branding, the customer email that has to go at the right hour. Sherpa carries Legal Day 1 and Operational Day 1 as separate things, because they are, and sequences the work so the difference doesn't catch you flat.

The plan that runs this isn't built from scratch at close. The plan comes out of the same canonical structure diligence has been filling in, so the work you did testing the target becomes the work you do integrating it.

Post-merger integration plan sequenced for Day 1 readiness

Seventeen seats, seventeen partners, one conductor.

This is where the pairing earns its keep. Every workstream has a person who owns it, and every one of those people now has a counterpart who thinks like the specialist you'd hire for that seat.

Warren thinks like a banker and works with your CFO on the numbers. Clarence thinks like a deal lawyer who's seen every contract structure there is, and works with your legal lead on novation and Day 1 readiness. Emma works with your head of people on retention and org waves. Oz works with your IT lead on cutover and TSAs. Samantha on tax structuring, Ziggy on supplier consolidation, Maxwell on the R&W policy, and so on across all seventeen.

Your integration lead gets Scout, who runs the whole bench the way a good integration management office lead does, keeping the workstreams in sync and routing each question to whoever should answer it. The plan spans close to year one on one timeline, and each partner keeps their own workstream current as they work, so the plan reflects what's happening rather than the last time somebody remembered to update it.

The governance is deliberate. A partner moves status and progress inside its own lane. Anything structural, adding a task, deleting one, reassigning it, stays your call. And the work that genuinely needs a person lands in that person's action queue: one list, per human, of what's actually waiting on you across every deal you're on.

M&A integration management timeline from close through year one

Seventeen M&A integration workstream agents

Then the deal earns one more partner.

The seventeen cover the functions every deal has. What they can't carry is what makes your industry different: the license that has to transfer before Day 1, the payer mix, the franchise agreement, the take-or-pay contract that changes what the synergy case is worth. So a deal picks up one more partner, an industry specialist who sits alongside the bench and already knows the things a generalist would have to be told.

There are nine. Sam on retail, Jack on manufacturing, Florence on healthcare, Eli on pharma and life sciences, Alexander on telecom, Drexel on financial services, Nikola on energy, Woz on technology and SaaS, and Conrad on hospitality. One joins your deal, not all nine, because a specialist is only worth having if it's the right one.

Which one is your call. Sherpa reads the target and proposes an industry, and you confirm it or choose a different one before anyone is assigned. Nothing attaches on a guess, because the wrong specialist is worse than no specialist at all.

Your CFO gets a partner who watches the model.

A synergy initiative in Sherpa carries its whole life: the baseline, the targets by year, the run-rate, what it costs to achieve, the net benefit, its maturity gate, and who owns it. You can follow one from a first-pass idea through validation to realized value and prove every step, with the evidence attached.

What makes the tracking real rather than a spreadsheet exercise is that actuals flow in. ERP data lands against the deal model, and Warren watches the gap. When revenue or EBITDA drifts from what the model said, you hear about it while there's still time to act rather than at the quarterly review.

The numbers roll up cleanly, too. The same initiative feeds the board view, the workstream scorecard, and the post-deal look-back, so there's one number instead of three versions of the truth.

Synergy tracking software with targets, maturity, and realized value

ERP integration for M&A: actuals against the deal model

Reps and warranties monitoring that runs from close forward.

Representations and warranties survive the deal by years, and the exposure sits there whether or not anyone's watching. Maxwell watches. The policy, the aggregate limit, the retention, the survival periods on general, tax, and fundamental reps, all tracked on a timeline running forward from close.

When something in the business contradicts a representation, that's a breach event, and Sherpa surfaces it with the evidence attached rather than leaving it for someone to discover during a claims process. The claims register, the notice dates, the exposure, the proof packet, all in one place while the clock is still running.

Reps and warranties monitoring with policy limits, claims register, and survival timeline

Every deal has its team. The firm has Henry.

The seventeen work inside a deal. Henry works above them. He thinks like a principal, running valuation and capital allocation across the whole portfolio, and the hierarchy is what makes that possible: because Sherpa knows which portco sits under which fund, Henry reads consolidated financials up the tree and tells you what's true at firm level rather than deal level.

That's the point of the two tiers. The synergies landing, the plans moving, the actuals arriving, all of it resolves upward into a firm-level read on where the value is and where the next dollar should go.

And the whole thing compounds. Every integration sharpens the templates and the taxonomy the next deal inherits, your partners build on what your earlier deals taught them, and Henry's read gets better the more of the portfolio he's seen. Your deal teams stay walled off from each other. Your firm doesn't stop learning.

Firm-level valuation and capital allocation across the PE portfolio

Board deck for your 8am? Already built.

Click update and Sherpa pulls the latest plan and the real numbers. Click export and you've got the PowerPoint. Board decks, Steerco packs, financial analysis, ready when you need them, because the data underneath is the same data your team has been working in all along. You review it over coffee instead of building it at midnight.

A Sherpa Steerco board pack, generated and ready to export