How one CFO helped raise $53m in the private market

The private markets have swung like a pendulum the last few years, or back and forth like “Jekyll and Hyde,” as Vincent Calcagno, head of US growth at Ocorian, a global asset servicer, described it.

“2021 and 2022 [were] definitely sellers’ markets, and it progressively trailed off to the point where ’24 and ’25 first half, [there] were pretty low activity levels across the board,” Calcagno said. “In the fourth quarter of ’25, everyone got excited because things started accelerating. Activity-wise, it continued in Q1 ’26, but then it just fell off the map.”

That brief fourth quarter acceleration in private investment deals included EvoluteIQ landing an equity investment. Baird Capital invested $53 million in the AI automation platform “in a minority growth capital round” in September 2025, EvoluteIQ CFO Pallav Sharma said.

Preparing “reliable reporting, a forecast that the board generally trusts, and a business that’s ready for scrutiny at any time,” Sharma said, helped the company make the deal—oh, and confidence, of course.

“I think it’s all about confidence. One side you have a seller, and sellers always look forward at the pipeline, the roadmap, and what the business can become. The buyer on the other side asks about how reliable the picture is today, in terms of the data, the forecast, controls, and whatever is uncertain gets priced in.”

Investor requirements. The current due diligence demands from investors are forcing CFOs to “almost go back to college or university, because the amount of data and analytics that the private equity firms are requiring of them has hit an all-time high, especially with AI usage,” Calcagno said.

“You’re talking about regression analysis, heavy analysis of the underlying data of the portfolio companies, so the CFOs have had to not just do their day jobs; they’ve had to take on night jobs of going back [to analytics school],” Calcagno added.

Sharma sees it differently; “I don’t think CFOs need to go back to night school. What has changed is the tools,” he said in an email.

“Private equity investors know a lot more analysis can be run on the same data, so naturally they ask for more. This is not a burden on the CFO, but it definitely raises expectations about what the CFO does with the data,” Sharma said.

The amount of data that Baird wanted from EvoluteIQ did not overwhelm Sharma, he said, adding that “our focus was on making sure the data was clean, consistent, and reconciled across our entities before any analysis was done.”

“Once that foundation was in place, responding to Baird’s questions was straightforward. The conversations were collaborative,” Sharma said. “Their questions were about understanding the drivers of the business, and good data let us answer them directly and with confidence.”

Preparation. CFOs can hone their deal prep skills, Sharma said, by understanding data capture, asking the right questions, thinking like an investor, building a strong analyst team, and using the AI tools themselves.

“Look at your company the way a PE firm would. If you know their questions in advance, you are always prepared,” he said, “A CFO doesn’t need to be the best analyst in the room. They should be able to turn any given analysis into the right decisions for the business.”

Using rolling forecasts, too, helps a CFO “work across multiple scenarios,” Sharma said.

“That’s your base case, and then with your base case, you can always have a look at your upside case, as well as your downside case, and you can always have different variables that you can put in across all the scenarios,” Sharma said.

“And if the market is really in a rough condition, you can always put a stress case on top of it,” he added. “I do it on a monthly basis, and when you are presenting it in the quarterly board meeting, you usually go with all the three scenarios. But I usually present the stress case as well—I call it an edge case, which is a completely different scenario: “What if?”