Replacing a legacy CRM. Building an investor-intelligence engine.
A private equity firm was running its deal pipeline, LP relationships, and portfolio tracking on a Salesforce-based purpose-built private-capital CRM: expensive, manually maintained, and unable to match new deals to the LPs most likely to fund them. We replaced it with Solena, rebuilt the workflows around AI agents that do the data assembly the team used to do by hand, and added the matching and relationship intelligence the legacy platform was never designed to provide.
A CRM that cost like a platform and worked like a spreadsheet.
Expensive seat-based licensing
Purpose-built private-capital CRMs carry premium per-seat pricing. The firm was paying enterprise rates for what was, functionally, a structured database with workflow screens. Every new analyst added a seat. Every renewal cycle the cost grew.
Manual everything
Deal records were maintained by analysts. LP communications were logged by hand. Portfolio company updates required someone to pull data from emails, decks, and quarterly reports and type it into the system. The CRM held the data. It didn’t gather it.
No matching or relationship intelligence
The platform stored what was entered. It did not match new deals to the LPs most likely to fund them, draft personalized outreach, or surface LP engagement signals from communication history.
Solena, scoped to private capital workflows.
This deployment is the Solena Customer & Deal Intelligence module, the first Solena module in production. It is an annual subscription hosted by Soligence and scoped to the firm’s deal process, LP cadence, and reporting requirements. See the Solena modules →
Agent-driven data capture
Agents ingest deal flow from inbound email, documents, and other sources and populate the system with little analyst time. Keeping the record current is no longer a manual job.
Deal ↔ LP matching engine
New deals are matched to the LPs most likely to fund them, ranked from captured behavior, structure preferences, and prior interactions, not demographic guesswork. Personalized outreach drafts reference each LP’s specific history with the firm.
AI-generated briefs and memos
Deal briefs and LP updates are drafted by agents from underlying data, then reviewed by the team. What used to take hours of assembly now takes minutes of review.
Relationship signals across the LP base
Solena surfaces what the team did not have time to find manually, including changes in LP engagement drawn from communication history. Intelligence the prior CRM never offered.
Two outcomes from one engagement.
The firm cut annual software spend by roughly 60% versus the prior CRM stack, and gained a deal-to-LP matching engine and relationship intelligence that did not exist before. The operating model changed: the team stopped servicing the CRM and started being served by it.
Cost & efficiency
- Annual software spend reduced by roughly 60%
- Analyst time on data entry sharply reduced
- Deal and LP brief turnaround compressed from hours to minutes
- Source-linked audit trail for AI-generated briefs and matches
- No per-seat CRM licensing: Solena is an annual subscription hosted by Soligence, scoped to the firm’s workflows and agent logic
Investor intelligence
- New deals matched to LPs based on captured behavior, not demographic guesswork
- Personalized outreach drafts referencing each LP’s prior interactions
- LP engagement signals drawn from communication history
- Every match and brief traceable to its sources
AI scoped to the workflow, not bolted onto a vendor’s roadmap.
Generic CRMs evolve on the vendor’s schedule. Solena was scoped to the firm’s actual deal process, LP cadence, and reporting requirements. The agents do the work the team specified, audited the way the team requires, on the firm’s own deal and LP data. That is the architecture difference, and the reason both the cost economics flipped and the matching and relationship intelligence became possible from the same engagement.
Related: Solena platform overview · AI for private equity firms and portfolio companies · All case studies
Tell us about your current CRM stack.
If you’re running a traditional seat-licensed private-capital CRM, we can scope what an AI-native replacement looks like for your firm.
Intro call
30 to 45 minutes. You describe the bottleneck; we tell you honestly whether AI is the right lever and what discovery would cover. No slide deck, just a working conversation.
Discovery
Two to four weeks. We interview your team and review the workflows, data, and controls, then deliver a readout, a written report on where AI can help, and a priced proposal: for each project, its cost, the result it targets, how you’ll measure it, and when you can expect to see results. Starts at $5K, credited in full toward project work that begins within 60 days.
Project work
Custom software and modernization by our AI Factory, the senior engineering team and agent workflows behind every custom system we ship. Structured as a fixed-scope sprint, a multi-phase build, an ongoing operations partnership, or fractional AI leadership.
Most AI Factory engagements follow this pattern. Solena is an annual subscription with its own path: a conversation, a demo, signing, then implementation and setup. See how we work.