A CRM tracks the relationship. Not the decision.
DealCloud is the system of record for the pipeline, the relationships, the calendar of where every deal sits. Capital Refinery is the system of record for the investment decision itself — the thesis, the assumptions, and whether they still hold.
What DealCloud does well, and where the line is.
What DealCloud is built for
Pipeline, relationships, and process automation across the deal lifecycle.
Sourcing intelligence, sponsor and intermediary tracking, configurable pipeline stages, IC scheduling, document tagging, and reporting workflows. The dominant deal CRM for private capital and the operating backbone for many institutional teams' deal teams.
What it is not built for
Holding the IC decision as a structured, testable record.
DealCloud excels at the workflow around a deal — the relationships, the stages, the approvals. It does not maintain the investment thesis as a structured object the platform can re-test against operator data flowing in three years later. The IC memo is an attachment, not a data model.
Where Capital Refinery sits next to it
Underneath the IC stage of the pipeline.
Most teams that run DealCloud will keep running it. Capital Refinery sits underneath the IC stage as the structured decision record. When the deal closes in DealCloud, the thesis is bound in Capital Refinery — and stays alive across the life of the position.
Where the lines fall.
| Capability | DealCloud | Capital Refinery |
|---|---|---|
| Pipeline + relationship tracking | Strong — core capability | No — not the goal |
| Process and approval workflow | Strong | Limited — focused on the decision itself |
| IC memo as a structured testable record | Memo is an attachment | Yes — bound at IC with thesis and conditions |
| Operator data → thesis assumption mapping | No | Yes — continuously |
| Decision validity scoring | No | Yes — live on every position |
| Three-pass deterministic extraction kernel | No | Yes — every figure has provenance |
DealCloud + Capital Refinery.
Most teams that run DealCloud will continue to. The right question is what holds the IC decision after it leaves the pipeline. Bring us a deal that closed last quarter.