TECHNOLOGY & AI
This is the Technology & AI practice at Crescent Capital Advisors. It is led by an operator who has held the CTO and CISO seats through a full hold and exit. The practice assesses a company's technology before an investor commits. It also runs the technology, security, and AI program inside companies where no transaction is planned.
TWO WAYS TO ENGAGE
Either practice can be engaged alone. When a client hires both, the benefit of using one firm is in the handoff between them.
A large part of this work starts without a deal. A CEO may have an ERP decision to make, an AI program that has stalled, or a security posture a customer has started asking about, with no transaction planned. That work is bought from this practice directly. It requires no M&A mandate, and we do not steer it toward a transaction later.
You have a target under exclusivity, or a portfolio company whose technology has become the constraint on the plan. Start with the assessment: PRISM™ across five dimensions, with every finding priced in dollars and weeks.
You are a founder or CEO with an operating problem and no transaction. The founders route starts with the problem in front of you and prices what it costs to fix. The same operator does the work either way.
THE THESIS
By the time a deal reaches diligence, the model has priced the market, the multiple, and the management team. The technology gets a paragraph. Then the platform strategy stalls because every add-on takes nine months to integrate. One engineer owns a system nobody else understands. The roadmap the CEO presented assumes a team that has turned over most of its engineers in eighteen months. The model did not account for any of these problems, and each of them reduces the return.
OPERATING PARTNERS AND PORTFOLIO COMPANIES
For the Operating Partner
A defensible assessment of the technology before you commit the capital. The output is a risk map in board language, not a code review. It shows what is exposed, what it costs to fix, and how it affects the thesis.
For the Portfolio Company
Embedded leadership that builds and runs the systems, then hands them to your team to operate after we leave. The fractional CTO, CISO, CAIO, or CDO is accountable for EBITDA results.
The operating partner needs the assessment. The portfolio company needs the systems. Most firms buy these from two vendors who do not talk to each other. That is why the 100-day plan so rarely reflects what the diligence found. We do both, with one person leading.
PRODUCTIZED ENGAGEMENTS
Every engagement starts with an assessment.
An assessment of a target's technology, stated in financial terms, before you commit: five PRISM™ dimensions, each mapped to dollar impact, remediation timeline, and thesis risk.
Deliverable
PRISM™ scorecard, risk map, technical-debt inventory as CapEx exposure, and a board-ready 100-day roadmap.
Platform modernization, AI deployment, and infrastructure work across the hold, with every initiative tied to EBITDA, cost, or multiple.
Deliverable
Sequenced modernization program, AI governance with EBITDA-ranked use cases, and monthly GP-ready reporting.
A fractional CTO, CISO, CAIO, or CDO operating as a real executive inside the portco: owning the strategy, running the org, and reporting to the board.
Deliverable
Technology roadmap, org and hiring plan, technical debt as CapEx, compliance artifacts, and monthly board updates.
The buyer's diligence playbook run against your own company before the buyer arrives, so there is time to find and fix the issues and to write the technology narrative.
Deliverable
Sell-side PRISM™ assessment, remediation priority list, technology equity story, and a pre-built data-room technology section.
Fixed-fee. Scoped before kickoff.
HOW AN ENGAGEMENT RUNS
We assess the systems before we change anything: PRISM™ across five dimensions, with findings stated in money and time.
Checkpoint: a written risk map and a walk-away recommendation, even if we are not the team to build it.
The findings and the thesis become a short list of initiatives that affect valuation, sequenced to the hold.
Checkpoint: a 100-day roadmap the operating team signs off on before any work starts.
Embedded leadership builds and runs the systems: CLEAR™ across the hold, with checkpoints tied to the plan's timeline.
Checkpoint: monthly board-ready reporting and milestone reviews measured against EBITDA.
We hand your team systems they can run and documentation they own, and then we leave. Nothing in the setup ties you to us after the engagement.
Checkpoint: your team operates it without us, and the exit story is already written.
THE ASSESS DELIVERABLE
Composite example, drawn from real engagements.
A PRISM™ memo is written in board language. Every finding states a classification, a dollar consequence, a remediation window, and a confidence level. The full sample memo is published below, so you can read what an Assess engagement produces before you buy one. Three representative findings, de-identified:
The data pipeline every customer report depends on has a single author. It is undocumented, and the last outage was cleared at 3am by the one person who understands it. There is no runbook and no second owner. The deal model priced this key-person dependency at zero.
Infrastructure cost has grown every quarter with no corresponding change in load. On a comparable platform, right-sizing, committed-use pricing, and vendor rationalization recovered roughly 60% of the run-rate without touching the product. That spend is recoverable margin.
The platform strategy depends on integrating add-ons quickly. Today, setting up a new customer or acquired entity takes roughly three months of manual work. On a comparable modernization (modular architecture, CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code) that process was reduced to under a day. Until the same happens here, the add-on assumptions in the thesis are not supported.
METHOD
PRISM™ scores a company's technology across five dimensions and prices each finding. CLEAR™ runs the hold, phase by phase, against the same numbers. The AI Operating System puts one governance and deployment model at fund level, so every portfolio company inherits it instead of building its own. The rest of the method is published in full and listed alongside them.
Five dimensions, each scored 0–100. Every finding is priced as a CapEx requirement, an EBITDA drag, or an exit multiple implication. The output is built to inform price and deal terms.
CLEAR™ has five phases that run from close to exit, when the fund realizes its return. It starts from the findings of a PRISM™ diligence review and organizes the technology work during the hold.
One GP-level engagement that every current and future portfolio company inherits. It sets up governance, readiness scoring, and a repeatable deployment playbook, so AI operating capacity is built at the fund level and shared across the portfolio.
Representative Outcomes
These are Technology & AI outcomes from one PE-backed analytics platform over a large-cap firm’s hold period. M&A Advisory mandates and the companies involved in them are not published here.
Platform Growth
120x revenue growth
Services-to-SaaS transformation
Engineering Leadership
120-person org
Full technology org scope
Cybersecurity
Org-wide SOC 2 Type II
All 6 business functions
Cloud & Infrastructure
60% cost reduction
At petabyte scale
Operational Efficiency
3 months → 8 hours
Customer onboarding time
AI & Engineering
30% productivity gain
Engineering modernization
M&A Execution
Multiple transactions
25% post-integration improvement
Patents
2 US patents
Named inventor, AI/ML
CASE STUDIES
The engagements behind those numbers (the services-to-SaaS transformation, the org-wide SOC 2 program, the cost and onboarding work) ran under NDA, and the detail belongs to the client. The outcomes above are real and reported. The specifics stay confidential.
How We Deliver
The Named Lead
Managing Director, Technology & AI Advisory
Tech Due Diligence · Fractional CTO/CISO · AI & Data Transformation
Leads the Technology & AI practice at Crescent Capital Advisors and acts as the technology operating partner for private equity clients across the investment lifecycle. Previously led a full technology organization (engineering, security, IT, and operations) through a complete PE hold period and exit. That period included multiple transactions and an org-wide SOC 2 Type II certification. CISO and VP Product Engineering at Veekrypt.
The Specialist Bench
The lead is supported by a vetted bench of senior specialists (security and compliance, OT/ICS, data and analytics, manufacturing operations, AI/ML engineering, M&A integration). Specialists are engaged per scope and work under CCA leadership.
They are operators who currently hold roles at operating companies, not career consultants between engagements. That is why they are not pictured here, and why their assessments reflect how these systems are run today.
One Accountable Lead
Sujit leads each Technology & AI engagement personally, so one person owns the assessment, the plan, and the outcome. The senior advisor who takes an M&A Advisory mandate leads it from the brief through to close. Specialists work under the lead on either practice, and accountability stays with that lead.
Tools
Every one of these is free and takes a few minutes. The first is for an owner weighing a sale. The other three assess the technology, AI, and governance side of a business. All of them are built from the frameworks we use on engagements.
Live · for owners
Ten questions on whether your financial records, the business’s dependence on you, and your corporate records would pass a buyer’s diligence.
Score your readinessLive · self-serve
Which pre-existing debt (data, technology, process, or talent) is your binding constraint on AI.
Run the diagnosticLive · self-serve
A five-minute assessment of AI governance across five pillars, showing which are in place and which are missing.
Run the diagnosticLive · self-serve
Where technology protects or reduces enterprise value, scored against the criteria a buyer’s diligence team applies.
Run the diagnosticRecent Thinking
The most recent writing from each practice.
M&A Advisory
March 9, 2026
Cheap drones and autonomous systems are changing the cost-exchange ratio of modern defense and moving capital toward Counter-UAS, sensors and the autonomy supply chain. Where sponsors are transacting, and what the diligence bar looks like.
Technology & AI
July 25, 2026
Nearly nine in ten CEOs now see AI value, but only in targeted areas. New BCG data finds that organizational barriers, more than technical ones, are what limit scale.
M&A Advisory
March 3, 2026
When Middle East tensions flare, the reflex is to look for the nearest exit. Fifty years of market history, from the 1973 oil embargo to the current tensions, says something different about how equities behave.
Technology & AI
July 22, 2026
AI audit covers three different things at three very different price points. The cost is set almost entirely by scope: how many AI systems you run, how ready your evidence is, and which standard you're measured against. Before you price an audit, find out whether you need one.
Newsletter
A short brief for PE operating and deal teams on how technology affects valuation multiples. Each issue takes about five minutes to read. A new issue goes out most weeks.
M&A ADVISORY
Crescent Capital Advisors runs an M&A advisory practice beside this one, led by Bass Zanjani, Managing Director. It handles buy-side and sell-side mandates and capital raising for sponsors, family offices, and business owners. When we put a cost and a time window on a system that needs rebuilding, we test those numbers against what a buyer or a lender would accept for the same asset.
On a buy-side mandate the financial work runs first. The technology assessment is brought in when systems, data, security, or integration risk affect what the asset is worth. The buy-side page describes that handoff. It is optional in both directions: an M&A mandate does not require this practice, and a technology engagement here does not assume a transaction or lead to one.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
No. This practice is hired inside companies that have nothing in the market. Typical starting points are an ERP decision that keeps slipping, an AI program that has stalled, a security posture a customer has started asking about, or a technology function that has outgrown the person running it. It is also hired by investors assessing an asset before they commit. Neither route requires the other, and the founders route starts with the operating problem rather than a deal.
No. We are a fee-based operating practice, not a fund or a co-investor. Fees are fixed and scoped before kickoff. If you want a technology partner who takes equity in exchange for a discounted rate, we are the wrong team, and we will say so early.
A Big-4 assessment is written by advisors who have never run the system they are assessing, and it usually ends at the finding. Ours is written by an operator who has held the CTO and CISO seats through a full hold and exit. Every item is translated into dollar impact, remediation timeline, and thesis risk, and the same team can stay to fix it. If you only need a recognized firm's name on the IC memo, a large firm may serve you better.
Lower-middle-market to mid-market PE-backed companies, where technology is a material part of the thesis. A sitting CTO does not rule you out, and much of our hold-period work runs alongside one. A CTO is accountable for the system they built, which makes them the wrong person to grade it for the board. They have also usually worked deeply in one or two environments, while we have seen dozens across diligence and hold. What we add is the outside assessment, the comparison set, and the translation into CapEx, EBITDA drag, and multiple impact a GP can act on. Where there is no senior technology leader, we fill the role as fractional CTO, CISO, CAIO, or CDO. Where there is one, they get support and an independent second opinion they can take to the board. If you are a Fortune 100 company with a deep internal bench and an operating partner already covering technology, you do not need us.
Both. The assessment is full diligence. We also embed and run the systems during the hold (fractional CTO, CISO, CAIO, or CDO) and hand your team something they can operate after we leave. The team that writes the diligence memo stays to run the systems, and the work it does follows the thesis.
You own everything. We build systems your team can run and documentation they keep, with no lock-in built into the relationship. Ahead of a sale, the Exit engagement runs the buyer's diligence playbook against your own company first. The findings that would reduce the multiple get fixed while there is still time. You write the technology story before the buyer's diligence team forms its own.
Then we say so, in writing. A Gate finding that stops a bad deal is the cheapest outcome for the investor. We would rather tell you to walk away than write a comfortable memo you pay for after close.
Yes. The AI Operating System is a GP-level engagement. It sets one governance model, readiness ladder, and deployment playbook that every current and future portfolio company inherits, instead of a separate AI pilot at every portco. The program is early, and we are building it with a small number of design partners. If you want your portfolio considered as one of them, start the same way as any other engagement: send the brief.
Yes. Every engagement starts with an assessment, and you receive a usable deliverable whether or not we do anything else together. There is no obligation to continue. If the assessment is all you need, it is all you buy.
There is no pitch deck and no sales process. Tell us where the asset is in the hold and what the thesis depends on. We will tell you whether we are the right team and what the first assessment would look like.
Sujit reads every brief. If we are not the right team, we will say so and point you to someone who is.