What we built for WAD Capital, and why it mattered
Most investment firms don't struggle because their software is bad. They struggle because of what falls into the gaps between tools. The CRM doesn't understand deal stages, so the real pipeline ends up in a spreadsheet. The recruiting system has no idea it's feeding the deal engine. Documents live in a shared drive that nobody can audit. Every one of these tools works fine on its own, and together they leak.
WAD Capital was running that kind of stack when we started. The firm buys family-owned businesses in Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Germany and Luxembourg where succession is on the table, and it finds those deals through a bench of CEOs-in-Residence rather than a central deal team. That's an unusual way to operate, and no product sold off the shelf understands it. So every tool had to be worked around, and the workarounds lived in people's heads.
We replaced the stack with one system.
The shape of it
What runs today is a single platform: twenty-five services and shared libraries sitting behind one application of thirty-nine functional modules. It covers the firm end to end, from finding a target company through to running it after acquisition.
It didn't arrive as a big launch. We shipped twenty-eight releases into production between January and August 2026, roughly one every eight days, into a system the firm uses to run its daily operations. Nothing was rebuilt in a back room and switched on later.
What the platform does
The first piece is sourcing. We built a harvesting layer that pulls company data from European registries on a schedule and enriches it, then a target universe on top that understands what WAD is actually looking for. Instead of an analyst working through lists by hand, the system surfaces companies that fit the firm's thesis and ranks them.
On top of that sits a CRM built for deals rather than adapted to them. Pipeline stages match how the firm really transacts. Relationships between companies and people are mapped rather than implied. Meetings are captured and summarised automatically. And each CEO-in-Residence gets a prioritised view of what needs their attention, which they can act on and clear.
Recruitment turned out to be one of the largest parts of the build, which surprises people until they understand the model. Because the CIR bench is the sourcing engine, hiring quality and deal quality are the same problem. So we treated it as an investment system rather than back-office admin: applicant tracking, structured interview workflows, AI-generated screening and interview briefs, automated candidate communication, and a way to spread workload evenly across the team.
After a deal closes, the record follows the company into the portfolio instead of falling off a cliff. Portfolio companies stay linked to their original CRM records and to their parent holding structures, with leadership assignments, value-creation tracking, cash deployment and fund-level reporting.
Documents and signing came in-house. There's a managed file layer with permissioned access, an e-signature workflow the firm owns, reusable document templates, agreement tracking, and an audit trail across anything sensitive. That work absorbed what two external vendors had been doing.
Reporting sits across all of it, covering funnel and conversion analytics, outreach performance, and board and investment reporting, with AI summarisation used in the places where reading raw records was the bottleneck. Underneath everything are the unglamorous foundations: authentication, a role model complicated enough to need real thought, audit logging, cost transparency, an internal help agent and a mobile client.
What changed for the firm
The obvious win is consolidation. Nine or more disconnected tools became one, which ended both the overlapping subscriptions and the daily work of reconciling systems that disagreed with each other.
The less obvious win matters more. WAD's operating model used to live in convention. Who sources and who approves, what makes a company a fit, why the recruiting pipeline is a deal pipeline. That knowledge sat with the people who had been there longest. It now sits in the software, which means it survives someone leaving and it scales to someone joining.
There's also a measurement change. Actions across the platform record who did what and when, so questions the firm used to answer by opinion have data behind them. How quickly do we act. Where do deals stall. What does the pipeline actually convert at. Where the system makes a judgement call, the settings behind that call are exposed to administrators and informed by the firm's own history, so it can be retuned without a developer.
Running costs became visible too. Infrastructure, AI and third-party data spend show up inside the product with live figures rather than arriving as a surprise on an invoice.
And because it's one system on shared foundations, each new capability costs less than the one before it. The platform grew from a deal pipeline into something closer to a full operating system for the firm without ever needing a rewrite.
How we worked
Three habits did most of the heavy lifting.
We write the specification before the code. Every feature gets documented as user stories with acceptance criteria, and open questions get named rather than quietly assumed away. Those specs are grounded in an audit of what the codebase already does, which has caught more than one bad assumption before it turned into bad software.
We plan against real capacity. Roadmaps get cut monthly, split between an infrastructure track and product tracks, with dependencies sequenced deliberately and every deferral given a reason. We commit to what fits in the month, not what sounds good in a meeting.
And we release continuously. Small, frequent, documented releases, each with notes the firm's own users read inside the product. Feedback comes back in days.
Why it was worth doing
Buying software off the shelf means agreeing to work the way that software works. For most companies that trade is fine. For a firm whose advantage comes from doing something unusual, it slowly wears down the thing that made it valuable in the first place.
WAD Capital now runs on a platform built around its model rather than in spite of it.