Dakota for Corporate Development Teams

Stop waiting for bankers to bring you deals.
Build your own pipeline first.

Name: Dakota Marketplace for Corporate Development Teams
Brand: Dakota
Price: 16500 USD
Availability: InStock

Most corp dev teams spend their careers reacting to marketed deals, arriving late to processes, and paying auction premiums. Dakota gives you the complete private company universe before any banker is involved.

Book A Demo Explore the Platform

642K+

Private Companies

143K+

Sponsor-Backed Portcos

20K+

Verified Transactions

26K+

GP / Sponsor Accounts

$2,995

Per User / Per Year

Less than the cost of a single auction premium avoided. All four datasets. No enterprise contract.

The Two Ways Corp Dev Teams Operate

The reactive team waits for bankers.
The proactive team already knows the market.

There are two modes of operating as a corporate development team. One is entirely dependent on bankers. The other controls its own pipeline. Dakota makes the second mode available to every team.

Reactive: How Most Teams Work

✗Entirely dependent on investment bankers to surface opportunities

✗Always in marketed processes, always in competitive auctions

✗Pays full auction premium on every deal, often 20 to 30% above fair value

✗Working from a CRM of a few hundred companies, manually maintained

✗No systematic view of sponsor holding periods or exit readiness signals

✗Sees deals only when sellers are ready, never before

Proactive: How Dakota Users Work

✓Proactively maps 640,000+ companies across every sector and geography

✓Builds proprietary relationships with targets before processes begin

✓Negotiates directly, avoids the auction entirely on the best deals

✓Sees the full market, not just the marketed deals

✓Tracks sponsor holding periods and exit signals across 143K+ portcos

✓Arrives at conversations months before competitors and wins on terms

What auction dependency
actually costs a corp dev team.

The best acquisitions never go through a formal process. The corp dev teams that consistently execute the best deals are not the ones with the largest acquisition budgets. They are the ones with the most complete, most current picture of the private company universe in their sectors and the discipline to cultivate relationships systematically, years before a transaction is contemplated. Dakota delivers that picture, systematically, at $2,995 per user per year.

20-30%

Typical auction premium paid above bilateral negotiation value

$20-30M

Premium paid on a $100M deal seen through a bank process

20-30 hrs

Hours per week a corp dev analyst spends on manual research

1 in 500

Private companies in a typical corp dev CRM vs. the full market

"The best corporate development teams we have worked with share one thing in common: they already know who they want to buy years before the company goes to market. They have mapped the sector completely, tracked the sponsor holding periods, and built relationships with management teams before any banker is involved. Dakota is the platform that makes that approach systematic for any corp dev team, at any company size, at $2,995 per user per year."

Gui Costin, CEO & Founder, Dakota

The Dakota Data Advantage

Four datasets that give corp dev teams
an unfair information advantage.

Every dataset in Dakota was built to answer the questions a corporate development team asks every day. Together they give you a complete, current, actionable picture of your acquisition universe.

Dataset 1

642K

Private Companies: The Complete Target Universe

642,000+ private companies across 11 sectors, sponsor-backed and independent, with verified C-suite contacts, revenue and employee estimates, ownership structure, and growth signals. Your acquisition target universe is not the 300 companies in your CRM. Dakota is the first platform that makes the complete picture searchable in seconds.

Dataset 2

143K+

Sponsor-Backed Portcos: With Exit Timing Signals

143,000+ sponsor-backed portfolio companies mapped to their GP, fund vintage, and acquisition history. These are the most predictable acquisition targets in the market, professionalized businesses approaching structured exit timelines. Dakota lets you track the full universe sorted by how long the sponsor has held them.

Dataset 3

20K+

Verified Transactions: Every Deal, Every Participant

20,000+ verified private market transactions growing at 2,000 per month, with full participant visibility across buyers, sellers, lenders, advisors, and law firms. Your comp transaction database, your competitive M&A intelligence layer, and your market activity monitor in one place.

Dataset 4

26K+

GP & Sponsor Intelligence: Know Your Competition for Every Deal

26,000+ GP accounts across PE, VC, private credit, real estate, and infrastructure, with verified partner contacts, fund vintages, investment strategy, and deal history. In M&A, you are almost always competing against PE sponsors for the same targets. Dakota tells you exactly who else is active in your sector and which sponsors are most likely to be selling in the next 12 to 24 months.

All Datasets

Daily

Research-Updated: Not Scraped from Stale Filings

Every record in Dakota is updated by our research team on an ongoing basis. Ownership changes, executive moves, new transactions, fund launches, and portfolio company transitions are reflected in real time, not in the next quarterly database refresh. The picture you see today is the picture that is accurate today. That is the standard every corp dev team needs and almost no data provider delivers.

The M&A Lifecycle

Dakota works across every stage
of your acquisition process.

Corporate development is not a single activity. It is a continuous process from long-range market mapping through target identification, relationship building, deal evaluation, and post-close integration. Dakota delivers intelligence at every stage.

642,000+ companies

Market Mapping

Build the complete sector map, every company, every ownership structure, every size, before the first conversation.

Sector + ownership filters

Target Identification

Filter to the highest-priority targets by size, geography, sponsor status, and time-in-hold signals.

Verified C-suite contacts

Relationship Building

Reach the right people, CEO, CFO, board members, before a process begins and before bankers are involved.

20,000+ comp transactions

Deal Evaluation

Build defensible comparable transaction sets from verified deal data, not bankers' curated comp packages.

26,000+ GP accounts

Competitive Intelligence

Know who else is likely to bid, their deal history, their fund timeline, their appetite, before the process opens.

Knowing When to Move

The best deal intelligence tells you when a company is ready
before they know it.

The most valuable information in M&A is not what a company is worth. It is when they will be ready to sell, and whether you get there before anyone else does. Dakota surfaces the signals that tell you when to act.

Exit Window Signal

Sponsor Holding Period Approaching 4 to 6 Years

PE funds typically target exits 4 to 7 years after acquisition. Dakota tracks the acquisition date of every sponsor-backed portco, letting you identify which companies are approaching the window where their PE owner is most motivated to sell. These are the conversations worth starting 18 months early.

Ownership Transition Signal

Founder-Owned Companies Showing Leadership Changes

Executive changes, a new CFO hired, a CEO stepping back to a board role, key operational hires, are among the strongest signals that a founder-owned business is preparing for a transition. Dakota tracks personnel changes daily across 500,000+ independent companies, surfacing these signals before they reach banker radar.

Market Activity Signal

Transaction Velocity Increasing in Your Target Sector

When deal activity accelerates in a sector, prices follow. Dakota's transaction feed shows you that acceleration in real time, giving you the signal to accelerate your own outreach before competition drives up seller expectations and auction premiums.

Platform Company Signal

Sponsor Building a Platform in Your Target Sector

When a PE sponsor completes a platform acquisition and begins an add-on strategy in your sector, they become both a competitor for add-on targets and a potential seller of the full platform 3 to 5 years later. Dakota's transaction data shows you that platform-building activity in real time.

Bilateral Opportunity Signal

Companies Not Yet Backed or Banked

The 500,000+ independent businesses in Dakota represent the largest pool of bilateral deal opportunities in private markets. These companies have no banker, no advisor, no formal process. The corp dev team that reaches them first, with a compelling story, can frequently negotiate directly without competition.

Competitive Intelligence Signal

Tracking What Your Competitors Are Acquiring

Dakota's transaction database shows you every acquisition your direct competitors have made, sector, target size, deal structure, advisory relationships. If your primary competitor has made five acquisitions in a sector in 24 months, that is a strategic signal about where they are building capability. Know what they are doing before the press release.

What Corp Dev Teams Actually Do With Dakota

Eight specific ways the platform
changes how your team works.

Dakota is not a general-purpose research tool. It is built for the specific intelligence tasks that corporate development teams perform every week, replacing the manual research and fragmented data sources that consume most of a team's available time.

Deal Sourcing: Build a proprietary target pipeline from the full private company universe

Search 642,000+ private companies by sector, sub-industry, geography, revenue range, and ownership structure to build a systematically prioritized pipeline of acquisition targets. Filter by sponsor-backed vs. independent, by time-in-hold, by executive profile. Your pipeline becomes a living document, not a static spreadsheet.

642,000+ companies · Sector / Geography / Ownership Filters · Updated Daily

Executive Outreach: Reach CEOs and boards of target companies before any process begins

Dakota provides verified individual-level C-suite contacts, CEO, CFO, CTO, board members, for every company in the platform. The difference between building a relationship and receiving a banker's call is who reaches out first. Dakota eliminates the research bottleneck that prevents most corp dev teams from doing proactive outreach at scale.

Verified Individual Contacts · CEO / CFO / Board · Direct Email and Title Data

Comp Transactions: Build defensible comparable transaction sets that hold up in board presentations

20,034 verified private market transactions with full participant visibility across buyer, seller, structure, sector, and value. When you need to present a valuation range to your board or defend a bid price in a negotiation, your comp set needs to be verified, complete, and current. Dakota's transaction database makes that analysis rigorous and fast.

20,034 Verified Transactions · Full Participant Visibility · +2,000 Added Monthly

Competitive Intelligence: Know exactly what your direct competitors have been acquiring and why

Filter Dakota's transaction database by buyer to see every acquisition your competitors have made, sector, target profile, deal size, and advisory relationships. Map their build-out strategy before their annual report reveals it. If they are buying aggressively in a sector, you need to know now.

Filter by Acquirer · Sector and Sub-Industry Tagging · Advisory Relationship Mapping

Sponsor Intelligence: Track which PE sponsors are building in your sector and which are approaching exits

26,000+ GP accounts with fund vintages, portfolio compositions, and deal histories. For corp dev, the most important sponsors to watch are the ones 4 to 5 years into their hold of a platform company in your sector. Those platform exits are often the best acquisition opportunities available, large, professionalized, and motivated.

26,000+ GP Accounts · Fund Vintage Tracking · Portfolio Company Mapping

Add-On Identification: Find bolt-on targets for existing business units before your competitors do

Dakota's similar company engine instantly maps every business with a comparable sector, industry, sub-industry, and business model profile to any company in the database. For corp dev teams managing active M&A programs across multiple business units, this turns add-on identification from a multi-week research project into a real-time, continuously updated target list.

Automated Peer Identification · Sector / Sub-Industry Matching · Revenue and Employee Signals

Market Intelligence: Monitor transaction velocity and pricing trends in your target sectors in real time

Dakota's transaction feed grows at approximately 2,000 new verified deals per month, giving corp dev teams a continuous read on deal activity in any sector. When deal volume in a target sector accelerates, that is a signal to either move faster on existing targets or reset seller price expectations upward. You get that signal from Dakota in real time, not from a quarterly industry report.

Real-Time Transaction Feed · Sector Filtering · Monthly Sector Reports

Geographic Targeting: Build concentrated target lists for specific metros, regions, or expansion markets

Dakota's Map It feature filters the entire private company universe by geographic area, metro level, state level, or custom region. For corp dev teams evaluating geographic expansion or building acquisition pipelines in new markets, this delivers a complete view of who is operating in a target geography before a single flight is booked or a single cold call is made.

Metro Area Filtering · Geographic Concentration Maps · Travel Planning Integration

Complete private markets intelligence.
One price. Full access.

$2,995

per user / per year / full platform access

The auction premium avoided on a single $50M deal is 2,000x the annual subscription cost. Legacy data providers charge $50,000 to $200,000 per year for comparable private markets intelligence. Dakota delivers the same GP data, private company coverage, and transaction intelligence at a price point designed for every corporate development professional. Most teams are productive within the first week. No implementation cycle. No procurement odyssey.

What's Included: Full Platform Access

✓642,000+ Private Companies, sponsor-backed and independent, across 11 sectors, verified and updated daily with C-suite contacts, revenue estimates, and ownership data

✓20,000+ Verified Transactions, full participant visibility across buyers, sellers, lenders, advisors, and law firms, growing at 2,000 new deals per month

✓26,000+ GP & Sponsor Accounts, fund vintages, portfolio compositions, deal histories, and verified partner contacts across every private markets strategy

✓143,000+ Sponsor-Backed Portfolio Companies, mapped to GP, fund, and acquisition date with exit window tracking and hold period signals

✓Similar Company Engine, instant add-on and peer identification by sector, sub-industry, and business model profile

✓Geographic Targeting (Map It), filter every company and transaction by metro area, state, or custom region

✓Joe AI Report Builder, company summaries, meeting prep, and sector analysis in seconds using live platform data

✓CRM & API Integrations, Salesforce, DealCloud, HubSpot, Affinity, Snowflake, and full Dakota API access

Lives inside the tools your team already uses.

Dakota integrates directly into your existing CRM and data infrastructure so intelligence flows into the workflows your corp dev team already uses, not as a separate tab that requires context switching.

Salesforce

Native CRM

DealCloud

CRM

Affinity

CRM

HubSpot

CRM

Snowflake

Data Warehouse

Dynamo

CRM

Altvia

CRM

Dakota API

Direct Access

See Dakota for Corporate Development
for your team.

A member of the Dakota team will follow up within one business day. No lengthy procurement cycles. No six-month onboarding. Most corp dev teams are productive within the first week, with immediate access to 642,000+ private companies, 20,000+ verified transactions, 26,000+ sponsor accounts, and real-time exit window signals across 143,000+ portfolio companies.

Book a Live Demo

Four Ways to Get Started

📄

Download the Platform Guide

See the full dataset before committing to a conversation

▶

Watch the 2-Minute Overview

How corp dev teams use Dakota to source deals before bankers call

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Read the Case Studies

How teams like yours have used Dakota to win deals before they went to market

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