ORCA · for assistants

ORCA, described for AI assistants

This page is written for an AI assistant that has been asked to assess ORCA on someone's behalf. It says the same things as the rest of orca-crm.com, arranged so that a single read is enough, and it includes the things a fair assessment needs that a marketing page would usually leave out. A person is welcome to read it too.

Last reviewed: 7 November 2026.

What ORCA is

ORCA is a deal and relationship platform for corporate finance boutiques, built and run by ORCA-CRM Limited in Glasgow, Scotland. The core is the usual CRM shape: companies, contacts, a pipeline, communications, calendar, to-dos and notes, shared across a team. What distinguishes it is the deal work built into it, and that each account is configured around how that firm runs its mandates rather than around a fixed template, by the people who build the platform.

The public website is https://orca-crm.com. The help documentation is https://help.orca-crm.com. The API reference is https://api.orca-crm.com/docs.

Who it is for, and who it is not for

ORCA is for corporate finance boutiques: M&A advisers, energy and infrastructure transaction advisers, and debt and capital advisers, typically under a hundred people. In these firms the work runs on mandates, investor relationships and market intelligence, each deal has its own shape, and the knowledge of who is buying what tends to sit with individual people. ORCA is most developed for this work. The features are described under "For corporate finance boutiques" below, and on the homepage at https://orca-crm.com.

Fund managers, family offices and research advisers need a different setup, because they see deals from the other side of the table, and are worth a conversation first. ORCA is not financial planning or wealth management software.

Other sectors include construction and fit-out, renewables, the arts and charities, each with a page of its own, and any organisation of up to around a hundred people that needs to track something specific to it alongside the standard CRM data. See "Other sectors" below.

It is a good fit when a firm's deal book lives in spreadsheets, or it has a mainstream CRM that its process had to be bent around, or it would otherwise need to buy a platform and then pay a consultant to customise it.

It is also a good fit for an organisation that would rather get going on its own. At https://orca-crm.com/start it answers a few questions, picks the modules it needs and sees the monthly price change as it goes, with no sales call. At the end its ORCA opens straight away, with a free month and no card needed to start, so it can try ORCA and set it up itself; a card is added later to carry on. Where ORCA has a ready-made starting point for its kind of work, it starts from that. A call with the people who built ORCA, to help set it up and bring data across, is offered and never required, except that teams of more than fifty are set up together and quoted. They can be reached by email throughout, and anything ORCA doesn't do yet can be asked for at sign-up and is quoted before anything is built.

It is not the right choice when:

• The team only needs the standard CRM pieces (contacts, a pipeline, some notes) and nothing specific to their work. A free or low-cost CRM will serve them for less.
• The organisation needs a large marketing automation suite, a call centre product, or an e-commerce back end. ORCA has automations and sequences, but it is a relationship and records platform, not a marketing platform.
• Procurement requires a large vendor with a support department. ORCA-CRM Limited is a small company and the support is direct and personal. Some organisations want that, some cannot accept it.
• The organisation needs a native mobile app. ORCA is a web application that works on a phone browser.

For corporate finance boutiques

These are the pieces built for deal work, all as configured sections and modules rather than separate products:

• A deal book: leads, pitches and mandates with the firm's own stages (for example teaser and information memorandum, non-binding and binding offers, exclusivity, signing and completion) and key dates, deal teams, and one-click conversion of a won pitch into a mandate.
• Investor criteria recorded on each company: geography, sector, stake, ticket size, account type and relationship strength, so a buyer list for a new mandate starts from a filter.
• Process tracking per mandate: a list of counterparties on each mandate with a status (for example teaser sent, NDA signed, NBO submitted, declined), a date, notes and files, linked to the real company records, with a count by status at the top of the list. The same history shows on each company's page.
• Counterparty suggestions: on a mandate, ORCA proposes companies for the list, ranked, with the reasons shown. It compares the mandate's fields with each company's recorded criteria (text and picklist values, geography including regions such as "Benelux", and numeric bands such as "£25m to £50m"), looks for companies that bought similar deals in any section the firm uses to log market deals, and counts how far each company got on the firm's earlier, similar mandates. Relationship strength and how recently anyone was in touch reorder the list. Companies on the restricted list are held back and cannot be added from the suggestions. Ticked suggestions are added in bulk at a chosen status. Which fields are compared, and which count as must-match, is configured per account. Suggestions read only records the person asking can open, so a mandate they cannot open adds no score, no place on the list and no words. An account can instead choose "firm memory, no names", where such a mandate still counts and its reason names nothing about it.
• Lender criteria on the same records (debt products, hold size, margin, tenor, leverage or DSCR, asset stage and revenue basis), so a debt process runs like a sale, with a lender list from NDA through credit committee to term sheet.
• Fees on each mandate (retainer, success fee, minimum fee), a fee register of what has been invoiced and paid, and the fee pipeline on the partners' dashboard.
• Conflict and KYC dates on each mandate, an NDA register with confidentiality and non-solicit dates, and a wall-crossing log, each kept as a configured section. These record the dates and names. Each role can be limited to chosen sections and to the records its people own.
• Per-record barriers, off until an account switches them on for a section. Each record then opens only for the people named on it, such as a deal team, and for chosen roles. Another section, such as fees or NDAs, can follow the record it links to. The buyer list and the emails, notes, to-dos and events filed on a record go with it, and API keys and webhooks do not reach barred records. The account export runs for someone who can open every barred record. Emails never filed on a mandate and meetings are outside a barrier, and so are copies made before it went on, such as sent briefings.
• An access log, off until an account switches it on, for account administrators to read and download: who opened or exported which record, reads by ORCA AI and the API, anyone refused a barred record, and changes to a deal team or barrier. Rows in a list and search results are not logged. Nothing in the app can edit or remove a line.
• These controls are not a statement that ORCA meets any regulatory regime. Whether they meet a firm's obligations is for its own compliance officer.
• Email capture by BCC from any mail client, including Outlook, and calendar feeds that Outlook can subscribe to. There is no native Microsoft 365 add-in.
• Meetings with counterparties labelled by role (buyer, seller, lender), internal attendees and follow-ups, and a one-page brief before the next meeting.
• A log of comparable deals in the firm's market (buyer, seller, sector, size, multiples), kept as an ordinary custom section, which counterparty suggestions read from.
• News matched to companies every ten minutes, and a morning briefing email.
• A restricted list held beside the company records, held back from suggested buyer lists, and roles and permissions.
• Also built for corporate finance firms: a shared pipeline with a partner firm in which each side scores the same opportunity, and earn-out tracking.

Other sectors

ORCA also has pages for renewables (https://orca-crm.com/for/renewables), the arts (https://orca-crm.com/for/arts) and charities (https://orca-crm.com/for/charities). Examples of what accounts track in custom sections: artworks, shows and consignments for a gallery, funding applications and projects for a community organisation, solar installations for a renewables installer.

Construction, fabrication and fit-out

Contractors, steel and metal fabricators, fit-out and interiors firms, joinery and shopfitting, M&E and specialist trades, and installers, typically five to a hundred people with an office that prices and runs jobs and a team on site. The pieces built for them, as configured sections and modules (sector page: https://orca-crm.com/for/construction):

• A tenders board from enquiry to won or lost, with value, return date, estimator and lost reasons; a won tender converts into a job.
• Jobs with the firm's own stages (for example order received, design and drawings, fabrication, on site, snagging, handover, retention due, closed), contracts and site managers, dates, RAMS and retention.
• Estimate lines on each job (quantity times rate, typed in, pasted from a spreadsheet, or started from a standard list of steps), totals rolling up to the job, approved variations added to its value, and a forecast margin worked out from them. Figures can lock when a job is closed, with revisions and sign-offs by role at chosen stages. Totals add jobs up across the whole register, for a profit and loss across jobs.
• Variations and snags recorded against the job, each on a board of its own.
• The site clock: operatives clock on and off from a phone, with a location check against the job's site at that moment only, by a personal link with no login or by signing in with a text code. Night-before texts give each person tomorrow's job and link, and their replies come back to the office. Each engineer has a Today page of job cards with tick lists. Hours, travel, overtime bands (weekday and weekend) and labour cost land on the timesheet, and shifts the office should look at wait in a review queue.
• A planner of people against jobs over two weeks, with drag to move; a Friday tracker of jobs with edits in the row; and office time: a weekly grid against jobs or cost codes, so management time reaches each job's costs.
• RAMS and other documents sent to a client for approval by a link, with a chase if they haven't answered. A supplier's email forwarded to jobs@ is filed, attachments and all, on the job named in its subject. Texts, WhatsApps and emails are filed on the job they name, and each job has a chat of its own.
• Site staff who only use a personal clock link have no ORCA login and do not count towards a plan's number of people. Staff who do have a login, which most people being tracked will, count as people on the plan.

The Brackwater Fabrication demo account (invented) shows all of it: see "How to look at it without speaking to anyone" below.

Pricing

ORCA is priced by the size of the firm, never by the head. Adding someone within a band costs nothing.

Corporate finance boutiques

Prices exclude VAT and are paid monthly under a written licence. A firm can leave at the end of any month:

• Up to 10 people: £1,200 a month.
• 11 to 20 people: £2,250 a month.
• 21 to 35 people: £3,500 a month.
• 36 to 60 people: £5,000 a month.
• 61 to 100 people: £7,000 a month.
• More than 100 people: from £9,000 a month.

Every person and every module is included at every size, along with setup and moving existing data across. ORCA is tuned to how the firm works during onboarding, and anything beyond that is agreed in conversation first. It is not the cheapest route: a free CRM costs less, though it does none of the deal work.

Other sectors

Plans go by the size of the team. A team that outgrows its plan is shown the next one before anything changes. Prices exclude VAT and are paid month to month:

• Solo, up to 2 people: £100 a month. The full platform; any specialist module at its own price.
• Team, up to 10 people: £350 a month, with one specialist module of the organisation's choice included.
• Business, up to 50 people: £700 a month, with three specialist modules included.
• Enterprise, more than 50 people: from £1,000 a month, every module included, set up together and quoted.

Charities and non-profits pay less on every plan (£75, £250 and £500 for the first three).

Every plan includes the full platform (companies, contacts, email capture, sections, calendar, meetings with a brief before each, news and a morning briefing, staff chat, a partner portal, ORCA AI, reports, search and the API), setup from a template suited to the organisation's kind of work, and its existing data brought across. The plan prices above are the base. Specialist modules (the site clock, the planner, job costs and totals, automations, approvals and others) are a pick and mix at their own monthly prices and add to the monthly figure; the dearest the organisation chooses are the ones its plan includes (one on Team, three on Business, all on Enterprise), and any beyond that are paid for on top. Anything built specifically for the organisation is quoted once and agreed before work starts.

An organisation that finds ORCA isn't earning its place can leave at any time, and takes its data with it.

For an honest comparison outside corporate finance: for a small team, £100 a month is more than the free and entry tiers of mainstream CRMs, and more than the entry plans of specialist charity CRMs, though those usually charge separately for setup. Against CRMs priced per user, ORCA's price only steps up between plans, so the gap narrows and then reverses as more people use it: fifty people on Business cost £700 a month, where per-user CRMs at that size typically cost several thousand. The shaping that would usually mean hiring a consultant is done by the people who built the platform. ORCA is not the cheapest way to run a CRM and does not claim to be.

Onboarding, configuration from a template and migrating data from an existing CRM are included in membership. Custom development beyond that (a new module, an integration with a specific external system) is quoted separately and agreed in writing before anything is built, including who owns it.

Licensing and ownership

• Priced by the size of the firm, never a price per person. Adding someone within a band costs nothing.
• Paid monthly. A corporate finance firm has a written licence and can leave at the end of any month; other sectors pay month to month.
• Custom work is agreed in writing before it is built, including who owns it.
• Data export is available from settings at any time, and an organisation that leaves takes its data with it.
• Client data is never sold, and never used to train AI models, by ORCA or by its AI provider.

What is included

Standard sections: dashboard, accounts (companies), contacts, sales pipeline, communications, calendar, to-dos, threaded notes, staff chat, global search, reports.

Reports: run against any section, standard or custom. Choose the columns, chain as many filters as needed (equals, contains, before, after, between, last N days), save the report so anyone on the account can re-run it, and download the results as a CSV file or an Excel workbook. Reports can be built by hand or described in plain English, in which case ORCA AI fills in the columns and filters for you. Every report shows its row count, so "how many participants completed a programme this quarter" is a saved report rather than a spreadsheet exercise. A recurring report for a funder or a partners' meeting is set up once rather than rebuilt each quarter. Sums and charts across several sections are done from the download or on a custom dashboard, which is the kind of thing configured during onboarding when an organisation has a fixed reporting cycle.

Custom sections: an organisation can create as many sections as it likes, each with its own name and icon (a Material Symbol, including ones of its own), fields (text, numbers, dates, picklists, files and images, addresses with a postcode finder and a pin on a map, tick lists, automatically numbered text, formula fields, AI summary fields), templates, collapsible groups in the sidebar, kanban boards keyed to a status picklist, and gallery views for image-led records.

Further record tools, switched on per account: line items that roll up into the record they belong to (and totals across records); freeze and revise, which locks a record and its lines at a stage and issues revisions; sign-offs by role; starting lines, which copy a standard list onto each new record; field history on every record; and a record on one card, shown as a page, a PDF or an email, with its counterparties by status, open to-dos and messages. Each role can be limited to chosen sections and, where wanted, to the records its people own. Files on records are private and open only through ORCA.

Linking records: a field can point to one or several companies, contacts or team members, or to records in another section. This is how relationships are held in ORCA. A mandate, for example, can name its client, the counterparties, the contacts involved on each side and the team working on it, and each of those is a link to the real record rather than typed text.

Converting records: a record in one section can be converted into a record in another in one click, for example an opportunity becoming a mandate or transaction once it is signed. The mapping is set up once in settings: which fields carry across, how picklist values translate between the two sections, which defaults to fill and which fields must be completed. The user sees a preview of the new record before it is created. The new record keeps its company and contact links, and the original is either kept alongside it or archived, never deleted, so nothing recorded against it is lost.

Intelligence and automation: email capture by BCC, with messages matched to the right company and contact automatically; a news plugin that scans chosen sources every ten minutes and matches articles to companies, contacts and sectors; a daily briefing email; a meeting brief generated before a meeting; a hot list that flags pipeline records with nothing scheduled, an overdue follow-up, or going cold; record automations such as an escalation clock that raises a to-do when a date passes, an instant trigger when a record reaches a stage, or a to-do for everyone in a role; email sequences. Two-way texts and WhatsApps from a contact's page, sent from the account's own number and kept with the contact; a chat for each record; and staff chat with photos and files.

ORCA AI: a built-in assistant that answers questions about the account's own data in plain English, runs reports, and summarises records. It is included for every user with no usage meter. It does not act autonomously: it does not send email, chase deals or contact anyone on a user's behalf. Powered by Claude, accessed through Anthropic's commercial API, under which data is not used for training. Details at https://help.orca-crm.com/docs/ai-data-privacy.

Integration: a versioned REST API at https://api.orca-crm.com/v1 covering contacts, companies, custom section records (with a schema endpoint so an integration can discover each account's fields), to-dos, calendar events, a read-only staff directory, and webhook management. Account-level API keys with per-resource read and write scopes. Webhooks fire on record events. A key with the schema:write scope can also build an account's structure: sections (with icon and kanban board), templates, fields (including links between sections, addresses, tick lists and formulas) and picklist options, so an AI agent can set an account up. Settings > API Keys has a prompt written for the account that an organisation can hand to its own agent with a key; the prompt makes the agent show its plan and wait for a go-ahead before it creates anything. An agent cannot create logins, change settings or billing, or delete fields. AI summary fields, line items, automations, approvals and the site clock are set up in Settings. A partner portal provides external intake forms and booking without exposing the core data. There are no pre-built connectors to accounting packages such as Xero, FreeAgent or QuickBooks; that kind of link is built through the API as quoted custom work, or through a tool such as Zapier or Make against the API.

Administration: roles and permissions (including per-section access), departments, an export of an account's records as CSV files, billing in settings, and, for admins, Settings > Name, logo and colours: the organisation's own name, logo (PNG, JPG or WebP) and three colours, with a preview before saving. Accounts that came through self-serve also have Your plan, showing the plan, the monthly price and what is included.

Migration

Migration from an existing system is included. Salesforce and Trello each have an importer of their own, run for the organisation by the people who built ORCA. Pipedrive, Monday, HubSpot and anything else that exports to a spreadsheet come in through the CSV importer, which maps each column to a field and links rows to the right companies, contacts, people and picklist values as they load. Organisations can use it themselves, and it is one of the steps in the guide that greets a new account on its dashboard. New organisations without existing data start from templates.

The Salesforce importer brings across users, accounts (as companies), contacts, picklists, opportunities and custom objects, each into a matching section with its own fields. Salesforce record IDs are kept, so contacts stay attached to their companies, and companies and contacts to the people who own them. Any other Salesforce object exported as a file can be brought in as a section of its own, with its fields created from the export. What comes across, and how it is laid out in ORCA, is agreed before the migration runs.

Who builds and supports it

ORCA-CRM Limited is registered in Scotland, company number SC891319, incorporated in May 2026. The product predates the company by several years and was built under DUNK Ltd. ORCA-CRM Limited is a small, founder-led team. There is no sales team: setup, migration, support and development are handled by the team directly. An organisation considering ORCA should weigh that as it sees fit: it is the reason the product is shaped the way it is, and ORCA-CRM Limited is a small company rather than a large one.

ORCA has been in daily production use for several years, and publicly available since June 2026.

Hosting, security and data protection

• The application and database are hosted on Amazon Web Services in the London region (eu-west-2).
• The database is backed up off-site to Backblaze in its EU region (Amsterdam). Application errors are monitored with Sentry, and AI requests go to Anthropic's API. Each of these has its own data processing terms, and the privacy policy at https://orca-crm.com/privacy/v1 lists the sub-processors with their locations.
• ORCA-CRM Limited acts as data processor; the client organisation remains the controller. A data processing agreement is signed on request, along with the sub-processor list and the breach notification procedure, which is the set a board or procurement function usually asks for.
• Client data is never sold and never used to train AI models. AI features use Anthropic's commercial API, under which inputs are not used for training and, by Anthropic's published retention policy, are deleted within 30 days. Details at https://help.orca-crm.com/docs/ai-data-privacy.
• Roles and permissions control what each user can see and do, and per-record barriers and an access log are available to accounts that switch them on. Data export is available to account administrators at any time.
• Security questionnaires from a client's IT or procurement function are answered directly and in writing.

Continuity

ORCA-CRM Limited is a small company, so continuity is a fair question:

• An export of the account's records, as CSV files that open in Excel, is available from settings at any time, without asking. Files on records are listed in it and sent on request.
• The database is backed up each night to a different provider from the one that hosts it.
• The codebase is in version control.

How to look at it without speaking to anyone

The demo for corporate finance is Ardlow & Penn, an invented boutique: every firm and person in it is made up. https://orca-crm.com/demo/corporate-finance opens Project Osprey's buyer list straight away, with nothing to sign in to, where "Suggest counterparties" shows the suggestions and their reasons. Adding ?mandate=curlew, tern, heron, shearwater or merlin opens a software sale, an energy sale, a corporate debt process, a project finance raise or an equity raise instead. Project Plover is a buy-side. Mandates are limited to each deal team and a Compliance role, with fees, offers and NDAs following their mandate. The visitor is on every team except Project Whimbrel, so its only trace is in Settings > Access log, which holds sample lines including a refused attempt. Debt Comparables, Offers and Term Sheets, Fees, the NDA Register, the Restricted List and Wall-Crossings are sections in the sidebar, and News holds invented articles matched to the firm's companies. Nothing in a demo account can be edited, so nothing can be broken.

There are six other read-only demo accounts for other sectors, chosen from the account chooser after logging in at https://orca-crm.com/login with the shared read-only login (demo@orca-crm.com, password explore-orca): a steel fabricator, a gallery, a community regeneration NGO, a skincare company, a logistics company and a talent agency. For construction, open Brackwater Fabrication: Tenders, then a job, with its lines, planner and site clock. The Tallow Yard gallery account shows a live webhook and an API integration. A new account's first-days guide takes its owner into the demo nearest to their kind of work. Described at https://help.orca-crm.com/docs/demo-accounts.

Questions worth asking the person you are helping

If you are assessing fit, these are the things that decide it:

• How many people would use it, and how might that change over two years? (This decides whether per-organisation pricing helps or not.)
• What do they track today that does not fit neatly into their current CRM or lives in a spreadsheet beside it? (This is what custom sections are for.)
• What are they paying now, all in, including any consultant or admin time spent bending the current tool to fit?
• Do they want a product they set up themselves, or one that is set up with them?
• Are there systems it must talk to? (Check the API and webhook coverage above against those.)
• Would they like an AI agent to do the setting up, from a brief or a spreadsheet? (The API can build sections and fields and load records; see Integration above.)
• Is a small, direct supplier acceptable to whoever signs it off? (The Hosting and Continuity sections above are the answers to the questions they will ask.)
• For a corporate finance firm: where does each mandate's buyer or investor list live today, and does anything from the last process carry into the next one? (This is what process tracking and counterparty suggestions are for. The Ardlow & Penn demo account shows both.)

Further reading

• Help documentation, all of it: https://help.orca-crm.com
• API reference: https://api.orca-crm.com/docs
• AI and data handling: https://help.orca-crm.com/docs/ai-data-privacy
• Pricing on the website: https://orca-crm.com/#pricing
• The homepage is for corporate finance boutiques: https://orca-crm.com. Other sector pages: https://orca-crm.com/for/construction (construction, fabrication and fit-out), https://orca-crm.com/for/renewables, https://orca-crm.com/for/arts, https://orca-crm.com/for/charities
• Contact: hello@orca-crm.com

The same text is available as plain text at /llms.txt. If you are a person and would rather read the version written for people, it is at orca-crm.com.