Carta has done 13 acquisitions in 14 years. Four of them happened in the last 15 months. Davis Thacker has personally led or helped lead 11 of those deals. So when I sat down with him to talk M&A strategy, product vision, and where Carta is taking its platform, there was a lot of ground to cover.
Davis leads M&A and strategy at Carta. In practice that means he’s touching corp dev, biz ops, partnerships, and also acts as chief of staff to Henry Ward, CEO of Carta. He came to Carta the same way a lot of people arrive at the companies they love: through a near-miss. He’d been deeply involved in the diligence on Carta while on the growth equity team at Adams Street, didn’t end up investing, but never forgot the company. When he was looking to make the move from investing to operating, Carta had an opening for a “strategy manager,” which he described as a “perfectly vague” title for someone transitioning from VC to the operating side. That was seven years ago.
Scroll down to watch the full conversation, or keep reading for the highlights.
The “ERP for Private Capital” and the Gap That Drove the CRM Acquisition
The way Davis frames Carta’s strategy today: they’re building a single platform for the three main constituents in private capital markets:
- Portfolio companies
- GPs
- LPs
The fund accounting and CFO tools have always been the core. The middle-office piece got a major upgrade with the acquisition of Tactyc last year. But something was missing on the front-office side, which is what drove the acquisition of ListAlpha, a CRM built specifically for private markets.
Carta has been watching the CRM market for four or five years. The timing came down to two things: the right product and the right team. Davis was direct when we asked what he was looking for in a target: modern infrastructure, clean API integrations, and a team living in the present. One signal that stood out for List Alpha specifically:
“ListAlpha was one of the first CRMs that we looked at that launched an MCP server. That was one of the things that said, hey, we know that this company and this team is living in the present and not living in the past in terms of what customers are asking for.”
Carta’s Build-Buy-Partner Framework
“We’ve been a lot more thoughtful around, hey, where does it make sense for us not to play from a build-buy perspective? And then let’s be really thoughtful and intentional about picking typically one partner and really going deep with them on these markets that we still think are adjacent to Carta — but for X, Y, or Z reason, we don’t want to own internally.”
Carta used to run a public plan administration tool that competed directly with Morgan Stanley Shareworks. They exited that business. But they knew that capability was strategic. So rather than walking away from the customer experience entirely, they partnered with Morgan Stanley to handle that piece. Same pattern with Odyssey on the transfer agent side, and now Vestwell and Morgan Stanley on 401(k). Several years ago, law firms felt Carta was a threat as they were selling directly to companies instead of through said law firms. Now law firms are one of Carta’s biggest channel partner groups.
The AI Native Law Firm Question
We wrote to Carta alum and lawyer-by-training Reed McBride (now running his own VC firm, Mintaka) to ask him what we should ask Davis. After all, they worked closely together for years. Perhaps not surprising, the former lawyer wanted to know about Carta’s strategy related to AI products for law firms. It’s a trend with real implications for Carta, given how central law firms are to the cap table and fund formation ecosystem.
If customers don’t feel the efficiency, he noted, AI tooling is just a nice-to-have for the law firm.
“I think the role of the law firm, the role of the lawyer is going to become a lot more thoughtful, a lot more strategic, and a lot less execution focused.”
Running M&A at Velocity
Four acquisitions in 15 months raises an obvious operational question. How do you keep from breaking things internally Davis credits the post-Carta X strategic reset for making that pace manageable:
“The deals that we’ve done over the past 18 months or so have been super targeted with a very clear ‘this is the exact problem’ that we are solving for for customers, for where it exists in the roadmap.”
The other piece is how Carta distributes the integration load. Recent deals have touched different parts of the business:
- ListAlpha is GP-facing and front-office
- Servatus is focused on private credit
- Accelex is LP-facing
Product and engineering teams are relatively siloed across those integrations, so no single team gets buried. And the functional teams going through integrations repeatedly, Davis argues, build institutional muscle that’s at least as valuable as having a dedicated integration team.
Watch the full conversation for more on Davis’s path from Adams Street to Carta, how the pace of model development is affecting corp dev timelines, and what he’s watching in the private markets infrastructure space.
