Weekly news - week of september 7, 2026. Investors continue to back fund operations with a new raise in the past week. Data providers are opening distribution channels, senior commercial hires signal a go-to-market push, and AI remains a roadmap priority. New & updated products. Specter has introduced Specter Agent, an AI agent that sources companies, researches markets and runs repeatable workflows across its private-market intelligence and the web. CAIS has released a set of platform enhancements spanning its CAISey assistant, new capital markets capabilities and expanded integrations. ROYC has launched an AI agent that lets GPs and fund administrators query committed capital, calls, distributions and compliance records in natural language. Taghash has released a WhatsApp deal-flow agent that reads inbound pitch decks in context, matches them to existing deals and files attachments and activity to the right record automatically. Drooms has brought full Q&A and user and permission management to its mobile app, letting deal teams run the Q&A process and manage access from a phone. qashqade has enabled natural-language AI querying of its private markets platform through the Model Context Protocol, with no additional plugins or tooling required. FINTRX has launched Fin, an always-on AI agent that surfaces advisor moves, allocation shifts, filings and M&A activity inside email, Slack, Teams and calendar tools. Deal activity. Fundcraft has raised €12m in growth financing co-led by Riverside Acceleration Capital and CCAP Investments, taking total capital raised to €40m. Partnerships & integrations. Intapp has released a DealCloud with Celeste plug-in for ChatGPT for Financial Services, letting deal teams query their firm's client, deal, investor and relationship records from within ChatGPT. Datasite is integrating with Rogo so dealmakers can run Rogo AI tools on live, permissioned Datasite deal content without exporting documents. iConnections has brought Carta into its Get Verified programme, so Carta fund-manager clients can share independent, administrator-sourced performance data directly with allocators researching them. Tracxn has made its private-market intelligence accessible directly inside ChatGPT using the Model Context Protocol, enabling plain-language queries within AI workflows. Quantios has expanded its partnership with Laserfiche specialist Manx Business Solutions to add intelligent document management around its Quantios Core platform for trust and corporate services firms. CB Insights now distributes select private-markets datasets through Nasdaq Data Link, aimed at closing the disclosure gap for institutional investors. New clients. Quantium alongside A11, has been selected by European VC Project A Ventures (c.€1.2bn platform) to rebuild its data foundation, delivering faster reporting and AI-ready data. Chronograph has been adopted by lower-middle-market PE firm Renovus Capital Partners (c.$2.5bn AUM) to automate portfolio data collection, valuations and reporting. Office & personnel. Arcesium has named Brian Rosenberg President, Revenue and Commercial, appointing him to its Executive Committee to lead go-to-market and client development; he was previously President and CRO at Wilshire Indexes. PitchBook has appointed Brian LaMonica as General Manager and Managing Director of its New York office to drive commercial growth. Titanbay has hired Ludovico Buffo to build partnerships with Italian banks, wealth managers and asset managers. Vendor research & whitepapers. Axial has published its 2H 2026 M&A Outlook survey, in which 91% of dealmakers expect competition to hold or increase, only 45% of buyers will stretch on valuation, and 57% cite valuation gaps as the top reason deals failed. Altus Group has released its Q2 2026 US commercial real estate report, showing dollar volume rising faster than deal count, with a breakdown of which sectors captured the most capital. Forge has released Future Private, produced with Charles Schwab, a data-driven report on the trends shaping private markets and their growing role in the broader capital markets. Fintent has published a healthcare M&A propensity analysis flagging biotech and pharma (2.02x) and therapy and rehabilitation (1.52x) as the sub-sectors most primed for dealmaking against a 0.98x sector baseline. Did Holland Mountain Group forget something? Do you have vendor news to share? Holland Mountain Group want to know! Please reach out to Holland Mountain Group at [email protected] Thinking about your data and tech stack? Holland Mountain Group can help! Holland Mountain Group help LPs & GPs find the system, supplier or market data provider that is best-suited for their current and future needs. Get in touch with its team today.

Vocus names chief AI officer. Aug 20 2026 5:50PM Taps AI leader from Quantium. Vocus has named Ben Chan as its chief AI officer, with a remit to lead the telco's "company-wide AI strategy" as well as centre of excellence operations. Ben Chan, Vocus Chan comes to Vocus from Quantium, a firm that takes consumer data from the likes of banks and telcos and converts it into intelligence and insights for policy and business decision-making, or to inform activities such as marketing. He has been Quantium's chief AI officer for about a year, and was its chief operating officer before that. Chan has previously held executive roles such as chief product and data officer at Sportsbet, and chief operating officer at Envato. In addition to being chief AI officer, Chan will also hold the role of managing director of consumer. Vocus revealed earlier this year that it ran an "AI developer tool pilot" project with Amazon Q Developer, reporting productivity improvements and faster validation of ideas for new product features among its results. It has also previously discussed an advanced Vocus assistant called AVA that is designed to "answer questions that our team has about Vocus policies, procedures, and best practices, saving valuable time searching various knowledge sources and documents." AVA was trained on Vocus' HR and security policies, its support centre working instructions and on a glossary of terms and definitions." The aim, though, was to produce an assistant capable of handling "complex and diverse requests relating to project management, data analysis, and more," it said at the time. Vocus' move to appoint an AI executive mirrors that of other telcos. In June this year, Telstra elevated Dayle Stevens to a new company-wide AI role, having earlier led the telco's data and AI function. Meanwhile at NBN Co, AI leadership comes under Sonia Boije's chief data role. Additional reporting by Ry Crozier

Shiraz Amod tapped as new chief executive of Quantium Telstra. 09 August 2026 Consultancy.com.au McKinsey alumnus Shiraz Amod has been appointed as the new chief executive officer of Quantium Telstra, the joint venture between the data & AI consultancy and Aussie telco established four years ago. Based out of Sydney, Amod steps up from his most recent role as an executive manager, having joined Quantium Telstra upon its formation after spending the previous five years at McKinsey & Company and its AI wing QuantumBlack in the United Kingdom. Itself formed in 2002, Quantium has quietly assembled a team of more than 1,200 data scientists, AI experts, and advisors across over a dozen locations worldwide, and has further partnerships with the Commonwealth Bank and now majority owner Woolworths. "Shiraz has been with Quantium Telstra since its launch, shaping work across its programs as executive manager of Transformation AI, from Telstra's transformation portfolio to products serving Australian banks and consumers," the consultancy said in offering its congratulations. "We're looking forward to seeing what Shiraz and the team build from here." Despite Amod's obvious expertise and pedigree, it's fair to say his appointment as CEO represents a pretty rapid ascent from interning at an IT consultancy in Cape Town a little over a decade ago to now be leading a data & AI joint venture with Australia's primary national telecommunications provider, albeit with a stint at McKinsey & Company in London in between. A business science and information systems graduate of the University of Cape Town - class of 2013 - Amod started out as CTO for a South African travel company before soon joining Johannesburg-based tech consultancy BSG. Next stop was as a senior data scientist at McKinsey, and then deployment to QuantumBlack's global UK headquarters prior to joining Quantium. Now, backed by a cross-functional team of data science, network, and cloud experts, Amod is responsible for overseeing the design and delivery of AI products that can transform CX at a national scale, such as Quantium Telstra's previously developed 'Customer iQ', which uses daily predictive AI to provide for more personalised service, proactive remediation, and network optimisation, "There's not much else like it in the market," Amod said in respect to the decades of Quantium data & AI expertise combined with the scale and reach of Telstra, before concluding; "What we do matters; making customers' experiences better, keeping people safer from scams and fraud, and building digital infrastructure for AI - while using artificial intelligence to do it."