Company · 2026

Out of stealth.

By Sacha Nacar

Team Theory is the AI operating system for PE human capital: one system a talent team uses to run every search, assessment and review, with the judgment of the best leadership advisor and the memory of the entire portfolio.

It exists because of an afternoon that didn’t stick. A top advisor spent a day training a fund’s portfolio-company CEOs to interview, assess and build scorecards. It cost $30K. A month later, the CEOs had forgotten most of it. The methodology was real; it just lived in the advisor’s head and in a slide deck nobody reopened.

So the advisor was built into software. Not a chatbot with a hiring prompt — the actual frameworks the field’s top advisors wrote, codified: the Target, results-based scorecards, calibrated references, evidence-graded assessments. Then a memory: every portfolio company, executive, search and scorecard, sealed to the firm, compounding with every decision. Then the loop (define, assess, decide, learn) running in one place, reading the firm’s own documents and systems.

The first customers were the firms the founders had already trained. Five private equity funds pay for it today, managing more than $100B between them. They use it for the work a talent partner used to do by hand or send out: a CEO scorecard in fifteen minutes instead of two hours; reference calls synthesized against the scorecard; a leadership assessment in a day instead of a $40K engagement; a view of every seat in every company.

The bet underneath it is simple. The model is a commodity. What a firm’s process looks like when it’s written down, and what a firm’s portfolio remembers about its own leaders, are the asset, and nobody else is positioned to hold both.

We started with private equity because the pain is sharpest there: deal teams run a full diligence stack while the person underwriting the biggest driver of returns works alone. The same engine, unchanged, extends to every company that makes senior hires. That comes later. For now: if you run talent at a fund, come and see it.