For advisory, corporate finance & investment firms

Designed for deal firms.
Cut for yours.

Mandates · investors · market intelligence · every person included

The situation

The firm knows a great deal.
It just isn't all in one place.

In a boutique advisory firm, the story of each deal tends to live in about four places at once: a spreadsheet kept by whoever owns the mandate, a buyer list from the last process on someone's drive, a few years of email, and the part nobody wrote down because it was said over lunch. Nobody's fault. There has simply never been anywhere for it to sit.

It works well enough, right up until a partner wants the whole book before Monday, or the analyst who built the investor list moves on, or a new process starts and the firm rebuilds a buyer list it already had in March.

There is a quieter cost as well. In a firm like this, the relationships are most of what the firm is worth. Held in one system, they belong to the firm. Held in forty inboxes, they are forty separate assets, each with its own notice period.

ORCA gives the firm one place for all of it, shaped around how its mandates actually run.
Where it started

Designed first for advisory firms.
Grown up since.

ORCA was originally designed for boutique advisory firms: mandates, the investors behind them, the market around them, and a team that needed one picture of all of it. It has since been shaped for sales teams, research houses and investment work, each set up differently on the same platform.

So the deal-firm parts were never bolted on afterwards. Mandates, investor criteria, buyer lists and call reports are where it began, and the rest of ORCA grew around them.

It started in deal work. Every screen still shows it.
What gets built

The standard pieces, plus the ones
only a deal firm needs.

Every firm starts with companies, contacts, meetings, calendar, tasks and reports. What follows is the part that makes it yours, drawn from what we have built for deal firms so far. Yours will differ, which is rather the point.

The one partners notice first is the buyer list. On any mandate, ORCA suggests the counterparties from three things only the firm knows: what each investor has said it wants, who has bought something similar in the market, and how far each one got on the firm's earlier processes. Every suggestion says why. Restricted names are held back. Tick, add, and the long list that used to take a week is done before lunch.

The card here comes from Ardlow & Penn, a corporate finance boutique in the demo login. The firm and everyone in it are invented; the workings are real. Log in with demo@orca-crm.com and explore-orca, choose Ardlow & Penn, open Mandates, then Project Osprey, and press Suggest counterparties.

Walk round a deal firm

Project Osprey

Sell-side

Physiotherapy clinic group · 23 sites · United Kingdom · Majority

14On the list
4NBO
2IM sent
3Declined

Suggested counterparties

  • Mournefield CapitalStrong fit
    NBO on Project WrenHealthcare services£25m to £75mGood relationship
  • Thornbury CapitalStrong fit
    Bought Kinetic MSKHealthcare servicesUnited KingdomMet last month
  • Harrowgate HealthStrong fit
    Bought Corran Dental PartnersMajorityGood relationship
Held back: 2 on the restricted listAdd ticked to the list
From the Ardlow & Penn demo account. The firm, the project and every counterparty are invented. The reasons are worked out the same way for a real firm.

The deal book

Leads, pitches and mandates in one place, with the stages the firm actually uses, from teaser and information memorandum through indicative and binding offers, exclusivity, signing and completion. A won pitch becomes a mandate in one click, bringing its client, team and history with it. Partners see every live mandate on one screen, without asking anyone for a spreadsheet.

Investor appetite, recorded once

Each investor's criteria sit on its own record: geography, sector or technology, stake, levered or unlevered, ticket size, operating stage, and how strong the relationship is. A buyer list for a new mandate starts from a filter. Trade and private equity buyers of UK software at £20m to £50m, or majority-stake buyers of Nordic onshore wind, is a few seconds' work.

A buyer list that remembers

Who was approached, who signed the NDA, who bid and how far they got, kept against the real company rather than in the deal's own spreadsheet. On the next mandate ORCA reads it back: suggestions with their reasons, the restricted names held back, and the whole list added in one go.

One counterparty, many roles

A fund can be the client on one deal, a bidder on another and a lender on a third. Meetings record each counterparty with its role in the room, so the history reads properly from whichever side you approach it.

Call reports that get written

Meetings and calls are logged once against every company and person present, with the internal team, a follow-up date and the call report. Reports filter by attendee, so seeing whose write-ups are still to come takes a moment rather than a round of emails.

Comparable deals

The deals the firm hears about, logged in a section of their own: buyer, seller, sector, size and multiples, in whatever columns the firm already keeps. Comparables for a pitch become a filter rather than an afternoon, and anyone who bought something similar is put forward on the next buyer list.

News, matched to the book

The sources the firm already reads, scanned every ten minutes, with each article attached to the companies and people it mentions. A briefing arrives each morning with what changed overnight across the firm's own relationships.

A restricted list where the companies live

Restricted names and the date each was added, kept in the same system as the companies themselves and held back from every suggested buyer list, with roles and permissions deciding who sees what.

Also built for deal and investment firms: a shared pipeline with a partner firm, each side scoring the same opportunity in its own column; earn-out tracking after close; lender and offtaker outreach; investor and lender relations for a fund; portfolio assets with their capacity and key dates.

Who it suits

Firms that run on relationships,
mandates and a long memory.

Typically ten to a hundred people, with high-value work where every deal has its own shape, and nobody whose job is the system. ORCA earns its keep where there is real transaction flow and more knowledge than any one person can hold.

Corporate finance & M&A advisers

Sell-side and buy-side mandates, pitches, buyer universes and the relationships behind them.

Energy & infrastructure advisers

Capacity, technology, operating stage and the investors who back each.

Debt & capital advisers

Lenders, terms, facilities and the history of who lent on what.

Fund & investment managers

Investor relations, deal flow, portfolio assets and the lenders alongside them.

Family offices & private capital

A small team with a long list of relationships and a longer memory to keep.

Economic & research advisory

Clients, meetings and the conversations that lead to the next piece of work.

Discretion

Confidential by default.
Yours to take with you.

A deal firm's records are price-sensitive, and the people who sign off a system like this tend to ask the same questions. These are the ones asked first.

A system that holds a firm's relationships should be discreet about whose they are.
The arithmetic

Between renting a platform
and owning a build.

In most deal firms the data is kept current by the most junior people, so a platform priced by the head is cheapest exactly when it is least useful.

The usual alternatives are a large platform bought by the seat, then a consultant to bend it into shape and a retainer to keep it that way; or a bespoke system owned outright, which for a firm of that size has typically meant a six-figure build before anyone logs in.

ORCA sits between the two. Built to fit, priced by the firm rather than by the person, with the people who made it doing the building.

Pricing

We charge for the tailoring.
Never for the people.

From £100 a month, for everyone in your organisation.

Most software is sold off the peg and charged by the head. ORCA works the other way round. Everyone you work with gets an account, from the partners to the six-month placement. Well done for employing.

What you pay for is how closely it's cut to you. At £100 a month you start from a template suited to your kind of work, shaped with us on a call, with your existing data brought across. Beyond that is where ORCA earns its keep: sections built around the things only you track, dashboards for the people who need the whole picture, links to the systems you already run. We quote each piece before we start, and the monthly figure moves with what we build and look after for you.

For a deal firm the starting figure is rarely the useful one. A firm of thirty to sixty people, with its own mandate, investor and market modules, should expect a monthly figure in the hundreds to low thousands, plus quoted build work, all agreed before anything starts. Against the same headcount in seats on a mainstream platform, it is usually the smaller number.

You'll struggle to find anything cut this closely, at any price. And if it isn't earning its place, you can leave whenever you like. Your data, and anything we built for you, comes with you.

Prices exclude VAT. Paid monthly, with no contract. The figure is agreed in a conversation with the people who built ORCA, not a sales team, and reviewed once a year in the same way.

A second opinion

Don't take our word for it.
Ask your own assistant.

A lot of people now run this kind of decision past Claude, ChatGPT or whichever assistant they already use, and it tends to know a fair bit about how they work. So rather than tell you ORCA is a good fit, here is a prompt that asks for an honest answer either way. Copy it, paste it in, and see what comes back.

Open in Claude → Open in ChatGPT →

Claude shows a standard caution note on any question that arrives from a link. The question is shown in full, and nothing is sent until you press send.

The prompt asks where ORCA would be the wrong choice as well as where it would be the right one. If the answer comes back "stay where you are", that is a useful answer too, and it has cost you nothing to get. What the assistant reads is at orca-crm.com/for-agents. It says the same things as this page, arranged for something that reads quickly.

Membership

A small number of firms,
each looked after properly.

We would rather work closely with a small number of firms, on a platform cut for each of them, than run thousands of accounts on a generic one. The people who built ORCA do the setting up, the migration and the building, and stay on hand afterwards. That is the service, and it does not scale to everyone, which suits us.

The first conversation is about the firm, not the software: what it advises on, how its mandates run, and where the deal book lives today. Anything shared stays between us.

Apply

Apply for membership.

Tell us a little about the firm. If it looks like a good fit, we'll be in touch to arrange a conversation and a hands-on look at ORCA set up for deal work.

Something went wrong. Please try again, or email us directly at hello@orca-crm.com.

Thank you.

We have received your application and will be in touch shortly.
We're looking forward to building something brilliant with you.

We support
1% for the Planet White Logo
Also see ORCA overview ORCA for Renewables ORCA for the Arts ORCA for Charities & NGOs