What we announced at Amplify 2026 and what it means for your firm right now.
Private capital firms are caught between two pressures at once: LPs demanding more with less patience, and a deal environment where sourcing edge is harder to find and faster to erode. The firms winning on deal sourcing right now aren’t necessarily seeing better opportunities — they’re processing more of them, faster, and with better institutional context behind every decision. The margin for error in this business has always been thin — but missed conflicts and failed MNPI controls don’t stay internal problems for long. They’re the specific failure modes that keep GCs and COOs up at night. And the firms that pull ahead will be those that move with precision, not just speed.
Amplify 2026 was built for that moment. At our events in New York and London, we unveiled the most significant set of product announcements in Intapp’s history, purpose-built for the unique complexity of private capital. Here are the four things your firm should take away.
1. The agentic era is here. Generic AI won’t be enough.
For years, the work that defines private capital: deal sourcing and underwriting, conflicts navigation, and LP relationship management across funds resisted meaningful automation. The judgment required was simply beyond what the technology could deliver.
That constraint no longer applies. AI agents can now reason through complexity, adapt in context, and execute multi-step workflows autonomously. But here’s the distinction that matters: generic AI doesn’t understand how your firm operates.
Your fund criteria, your ethical walls, your deal history, your compliance logic, your independence standards. None of that institutional knowledge is embedded in any general-purpose model. Without it, AI produces outputs your team can’t act on.
The firms that win in the age of AI won’t be the ones with the best models. Every firm will have access to the same five or six LLMs. The firms that win will be the ones that put those models inside a system of work built on their own knowledge, their own expertise, their own relationships, and their own professional standards
Thad Jampol, Chief Product Officer, Intapp
That’s the difference between AI as a productivity add-on and AI as a competitive advantage. At Amplify, we were clear about where Intapp stands: we’re building for AI as a true competitive advantage.
2. Introducing Intapp Celeste: Firm AI built around how your firm works
The headline announcement at Amplify 2026 was the launch of Intapp Celeste, our AI-native agentic platform built from the ground up for what we call Firm AI: AI that understands your firm, not a generic approximation of it.
Celeste is not a chatbot. It is not a feature layered onto an existing product. It is a purpose-built platform with specific capabilities that address what private capital firms need:
- Industry-specific expert agents that automate high-complexity, high-judgment workflows across your suite of Intapp products: deal screening, due diligence, business development, value planning & execution, and LP onboarding & reporting.
- Firm playbooks that encode your methodology and institutional knowledge directly into AI. Celeste ships with out-of-the-box playbooks built on industry best practices, and your team can customize or create new ones in minutes, no technical resources required.
- A context engine that maps your firm’s terminology, relationship history, deal data, and business logic so agents understand your specific version of reality, not an industry average.
- Professional compliance built into the architecture, not bolted on after the fact. Every playbook and action in Celeste automatically respects your information barriers and access controls via native integration with Intapp Walls for AI.
- Intapp Celeste is model agnostic and can be used in Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot, or your tool of choice. Celeste can also integrate with a range of data stores such as Snowflake and SharePoint.
For private capital teams, this is what that looks like in practice: Celeste can screen a week’s worth of CIMs and teasers overnight, score each against your fund mandate, surface comparable deals and pass rationales from your IC history, and deliver a ranked summary by morning. It can also generate a preliminary LBO from your firm’s own template. Work that previously took days now takes minutes, grounded in your data and governed by your standards.
Live at Amplify: We demonstrated Celeste evaluating a new healthcare platform opportunity against a fund’s specific mandate in real time. In under ten minutes, Celeste flagged the opportunity as a strong fit, drafted a screening summary citing comparable deals from the firm’s IC history, and built a preliminary LBO model.
Roger Smith, VP Engineering, AI platform
3. DealCloud with Celeste: institutional knowledge that stays when people move on
Most private capital CRMs share the same fundamental limitation: they store data but don’t activate it. Deal history, relationship networks, IC decisions, and fund criteria sit idle. And when senior professionals leave, the institutional knowledge they carry often goes with them. A deal gets logged, a pass gets noted, a contact gets updated, but then that judgment sits inert. The next time a similar opportunity comes in, the team starts from scratch.
DealCloud with Celeste changes that equation. This is an AI-native platform. One that automates workflows and puts your firm’s accumulated knowledge to work inside the system where deals are actually managed. And all of the AI capabilities from Intapp Assist are now included. If you started early on this journey with us and already purchased Assist, thank you. We’re upgrading you to DealCloud with Celeste at no extra cost.
Across the deal lifecycle, that means:
- Intake: Ingest CIMs and teasers, extract key data, create records, and screen opportunities against your mandate, so your team starts every review with a structured summary, not a blank page.
- Relationships: It identifies the strongest paths to management teams, bankers, and sector experts using your full relationship history, not just recent activity.
- Institutional knowledge: It surfaces insights from prior IC decisions, deal rationale, and pass notes, preserving judgment that would otherwise walk out the door.
- Governance: It ensures compliance while respecting your existing permissions, access controls, and information barriers.
- Natural language interaction: Professionals can query their deal database in plain English: analyzing pipeline, ingesting documents, extracting data, and creating or updating records without navigating complex workflows.
The foundation underlying all of this is proprietary to your firm: years of deal history, relationship data, pipeline activity, and IC decisions, structured and governed in DealCloud. No generic AI tool has access to it. None can replicate it.
4. Built with Anthropic and Microsoft: enterprise infrastructure for regulated industries
The strength of any enterprise AI platform depends on the infrastructure it runs on. Celeste is powered by Claude, Anthropic’s large language model, and backed by our continued strategic alliance with Microsoft. These partnerships directly address the concerns private capital firms have raised most consistently about deploying AI at scale: data residency and confidentiality, model governance and auditability, agent-level access controls, and the ability to deploy within your existing Microsoft infrastructure rather than alongside it as a separate system.
Anthropic
Celeste is built on Anthropic’s Claude models, which are designed with a focus on safety, steerability, and enterprise trust. For regulated industries where model behavior must be predictable and auditable, that focus matters. Anthropic’s Head of Industries noted that regulated financial services is one of the most important verticals they serve, and they’ve structured their go-to-market specifically to deliver value through specialist partners like Intapp.
Microsoft
Our continued strategic alliance with Microsoft means Celeste is built to deliver enterprise-grade observability and governance across your existing Microsoft infrastructure. Microsoft’s Corporate VP for Cloud and AI made the point directly at Amplify: AI is no longer just a productivity layer. It is an enterprise architecture concern that requires identity management, knowledge governance, and agent-level controls. For private capital firms already operating on Microsoft, Celeste’s governance model extends across your existing stack rather than running alongside it as a separate system.
The firms that act now will be the ones that define the next era
Private capital has always rewarded those who build durable advantages before the market catches up. Firm AI is that moment. The firms deploying it now, with their own knowledge, data, and professional standards embedded at the core, will be the ones that are hardest to compete with in three years.
If you couldn’t join us at Amplify but want to understand what these announcements mean for your firm, we’ve got you covered.
Join us for our upcoming webinar on April 22, where we’ll break down the key updates, explore what they mean for private capital firms, and show how Intapp Celeste is helping teams put firm AI into action.
Ready to go deeper? Reserve your spot and see what firm AI could look like for your team.