Centari, an AI-powered deal insights platform, today (18 September) announced that it has raised $14m in funding, including an oversubscribed Series A of $8.4m. The round was led by Sentinel Global with participation from GTMfund, South Park Commons, Alt Capital, RiverPark Ventures, Recall Capital, and strategic partners in the fintech and legal industries.
Centari’s Deal Intelligence Platform inaugurates what it describes (see our questions below) as a new category of AI, purpose-built for high-stakes transactions spanning M&A, investment management, and finance. The platform says it moves beyond the capabilities of generalised productivity tools relying on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) or user-driven prompt engineering.
“Generic AI products fall short when billions of dollars are on the line and precision is non-negotiable,” said Kevin Walker, CEO and founder of Centari and a former Paul Hastings M&A lawyer. “Our vision for Deal Intelligence is to empower firms to harness information on a scale that was never possible before, delivering rich insights to the right place at the right time to accelerate transactions.”
The New York-based startup will use the capital to invest in R&D and hiring to scale Centari’s suite of products for dealmakers. The company’s team includes former attorneys from Kirkland & Ellis, Davis Polk, and other noted firms.
We asked Walker (pictured below) to tell us more.
Please can you describe how Centari works with examples of a use case?
Centari is built around our Deal Reasoning Engine, which is a system we developed to mimic expert analysis of complex transactional documents. Under the hood, it uses a proprietary combination of machine learning, LLM orchestration, and document processing methods. For lawyers and financial professionals using the product, you can load a 300-page credit agreement or 200-page merger agreement into the software, for example, and answer hundreds of sophisticated questions about that deal with accuracy that surpasses the capabilities of RAG and prompt-driven platforms. It’s sometimes described as data extraction but it’s really more like document understanding.
The product really shines for sophisticated deal work where the stakes are high, accuracy is paramount, and “quick and dirty” data extraction simply isn’t acceptable. We’ve seen our AmLaw 25 customers use the product for everything from preparing an LPA summary table for clients to building the firm’s proprietary deal database as a means to gain differentiated market insights.
Is it really a ’new a category of AI’?
Yes, and I love this question because it’s exactly what makes us so excited about the future of data-driven dealmaking. When we think of “Deal Intelligence” and what it means to us, it’s not just about “intelligence” in the artificial sense. Generative AI has become table stakes for the AmLaw 100 market. Everyone has a platform now. To stand out to clients and win more deal flow, what matters most is your firm’s unique market intelligence, your competitive intelligence. Centari’s about using generative AI to transform a firm’s intellectual capital into a differentiator. That’s why we’ve invested so heavily in our Deal Reasoning Engine. We’re not trying to be yet another productivity platform. We’re focused on what comes next when firms can extract and structure knowledge at scale.
Who should be most excited about Centari?
What sets firms apart is their unique knowledge assets, insights and know-how from past transactions. Firms view Centari as a competitive differentiator for leveraging their unique market insights and intellectual capital, both when it comes to winning new business and delivering a superior client experience at every stage of the deal lifecycle.
I would also say that clients themselves should be most excited about Centari. We all feel how fast the world is moving in the AI era. Deal work is no different. It’s more important than ever to get to closing faster and on the best terms, since time kills deals. Clients increasingly expect firms to be a strategic advisor through this new, fast paced transactional environment. Firms using Centari are better positioned to make that business case to clients.
Please can you tell us a bit about the company in terms of people and size?
We’re a talent-dense team made up of former attorneys with firsthand experience from firms like Kirkland, Paul Hastings, and Davis Polk, and engineers and researchers with enterprise software backgrounds. There’s a trend of companies chasing cash and then having to find ways to spend it, often at the cost of focus and specialization. Our strategy has been intense focus on a very complicated, very important problem with a team uniquely suited to solve it. The funding from this round will be used to continue growing our team deliberately.
What are your key milestones before now?
We spent the first couple years focused on R&D, then commercialized the product in 2024. We hit seven-figure revenue in under four months of going to market. Today, nearly half of the AmLaw 10 are Centari customers and we’re growing quickly with market-leading transactional practices. Our clients are predominantly located in the US, UK, and Australia, and we plan on continuing to expand globally.
Is there anything else you can share?
Our thesis is data-driven dealmaking as a transformative force. Deal intelligence is a nascent category that we predict will transform the legal industry in the same way data transformed marketing, finance, healthcare, and other legacy verticals.