Where Dakota’s Directory Model Ends — And Where Altss Begins

The 2025 Fundraising Reality: The Directory Era Is Ending

Fundraising in 2025 is defined by scarcity of allocator attention, increasingly selective committees, and a global shift toward evidence-driven diligence. LPs are not merely evaluating managers; they are evaluating precision, timing, and data governance. Their processes have tightened, inboxes have hardened, and cycles have shortened.

In this environment, what moves a raise forward is no longer the size of a contact list — it is whether a GP can demonstrate:

Fit with an allocator’s current strategy, check ranges, and pacing.
Timing based on visible movement: personnel changes, new vehicles, sector pivots, or event patterns.
Trust grounded in business-verified contacts, transparent data provenance, and compliant communication practices.

Directory platforms helped an earlier fundraising generation understand who exists.
Fundraisers in 2025 must understand who is moving — and why now is the right moment to engage.

Dakota Marketplace — a widely used tool with many positive reviews on G2 (https://www.g2.com/products/dakota-marketplace) — was designed for this earlier era. It offers curated U.S. institutional lists, a familiar CRM-like workflow, and one of the strongest Salesforce integrations in its category. Teams whose workflow revolves around dialing U.S. pensions, endowments, foundations, and consultants often find Dakota straightforward and effective.

But the fundraising market has changed faster than the directory model itself.
Capital is global. Private wealth is decisive. Timing is everything.
And LPs increasingly expect that IR teams arrive with verifiable, public-source signals — not just names.

This is the line between Dakota and Altss.
Between the directory world and the intelligence world.
Between “who exists” and “who is actually active right now.”

Dakota’s Role in 2025: Valuable for Lists, Limited for Signals

Dakota has strengths worth acknowledging clearly.

It provides curated coverage of U.S. institutional allocators. Many IR callers appreciate its simplicity: you search, you call, you log the conversation. Its Salesforce integration is exceptionally well aligned with firms that run their entire outreach engine inside Salesforce. For analyst-teams, placement agents, and IR associates who depend on CRM-centric workflows, Dakota’s fit is intuitive.

Pricing typically reflects this enterprise-CRM alignment, commonly positioned in the ~$15k/seat range, which is consistent with U.S. institutional calling models and larger IR teams used to per-seat licensing. For those who push volume into U.S. public plans, this structure makes sense.

But this model also reveals Dakota’s structural design — it optimizes for lists, calls, and CRM sync, not for allocator timing, signal intelligence, or global private-wealth depth.

Dakota’s profiles tend to reflect stable institutional descriptions, which are highly valuable for researchers, but not built around detecting real-time allocator movement. Teams relying on Dakota often find themselves doing additional OSINT manually — cross-checking news, filings, role changes, events, and sector signals — because the platform does not natively express these as timing cues.

The challenge isn’t that Dakota is inaccurate. It’s that Dakota was built for directories — and the market now operates in signals.

The Global Shift: From Directory to Intelligence

Fundraising teams in 2025 are confronted with challenges that directory models were not designed to solve.

Allocators today behave dynamically. Strategy windows open and close quickly. Personnel changes shape appetite. New vehicles emerge on compressed timelines. Family offices scale and pivot without public announcements. Global private wealth becomes the swing vote in emerging-manager raises.

Directory information alone can’t reveal when an allocator is truly accessible.

And as LPs become more diligent about data lineage and privacy, fund managers are increasingly judged not only on what they send, but how they sourced it. That makes deliverability, business-only verification, PII boundaries, and non-export governance part of the IR trust story.

This is where Altss begins.

Altss: The Intelligence Layer Designed for Timing, Fit, and Trust

Altss exists to give IR teams situational awareness — the ability to understand allocator movement in real time, write evidence-backed outreach, and operate with governance that LPs respect.

It is not a directory.
It is not a dialer.
It is an allocator-signal engine built on continuous OSINT.

Altss tracks visible change across:

• fund registrations
• personnel transitions
• strategy updates
• sector shifts
• portfolio activity
• press mentions
• event patterns
• digital footprints
• cross-border filings

These signals feed into Altss’s Fit & Timing surfaces, giving teams not just the “who,” but the “why now.” Instead of generating a list of institutions, the platform expresses the underlying movement that matters when writing first-touch outreach.

This is the difference between dialing and booking.

And this intelligence model scales across the most opaque category of all: global private wealth.

Family Offices: The Capital That Directories Cannot Capture

Altss maintains 9,000+ verified family-office profiles, updated on a ≤30-day cadence and enriched with contextual signals that directory platforms do not track. These include declared investment orientation, sector interests, check sizes, cadence patterns, thematic focus, geography, and visible activity cues.

Family offices operate globally and fluidly. Their strategies shift quickly, and their signals require continuous public-source scanning to understand. This is the segment where Altss is strongest and where directory models tend to remain surface-level simply because FOs do not behave like traditional institutions.

For emerging managers — or any GP raising across themes like healthcare, energy transition, AI infrastructure, specialized credit, climate, or secondary processes — family-office intelligence is no longer optional.

It is decisive.

Business-Contact Verification: The New Gatekeeper of IR Quality

Modern IR no longer tolerates unverified outreach. Domains are penalized, inboxes are filtered, and LPs increasingly expect business-aligned, verifiable contact practices. Altss uses multi-layer verification to ensure that business contacts are validated, while clearly distinguishing them from personal channels.

This is not to say Dakota’s data is inaccurate — it simply reflects a different model. Directory-style systems rely heavily on curated updates and manual refresh, while Altss treats verification as part of its intelligence workflow.

The result is not “better,” but fundamentally different:
Dakota is built for calling.
Altss is built for professional IR discipline.

Pricing Philosophy: Alignment With Raising Teams, Not Seat Count

Dakota’s per-seat model matches enterprise CRM operations. But for Fund I–III managers, emerging funds, and sector-specific GPs operating with small IR teams, per-seat expansion becomes expensive quickly.

Altss offers a single-license structure at $15,500/year, covering the entire allocator universe — with special pricing designed specifically for emerging managers, startups, and funds with limited resources.

This alignment reflects Altss’s design direction: empowering lean IR teams to operate like institutional-grade fundraising groups without inflating headcount or costs.

**The Fundamental Truth: Dakota Helps You Know Who Exists.

Altss Helps You Know Who Is Active.**

Dakota’s model remains useful for firms whose quarter is built around calling U.S. pensions and logging touchpoints.

Altss was built for the raises where the next 20 meetings determine the entire trajectory — and those meetings depend on timing, private-wealth visibility, verification, and narrative discipline.

This is not a critique of Dakota.
It is simply the structural limit of a directory-first architecture in a signal-first world.

And it’s the precise space where Altss begins.

FAQ

1. Does Dakota provide useful allocator lists?
Yes. Dakota remains a well-regarded platform for curated U.S. institutional lists and Salesforce-integrated workflows.

2. Why would a fund manager need Altss in addition to Dakota?
Dakota provides lists. Altss provides real-time allocator signals, timing cues, family-office depth, and verified business contacts.

3. Does Altss verify contacts?
Yes. Altss uses multi-layer verification for business-only contacts with clear sourcing and governance controls.

4. Does Altss integrate with CRMs?
No. Altss intentionally prohibits CRM integrations and CSV/API export for governance and PII compliance.

5. What makes Altss suitable for emerging managers?
Single-license pricing, evidence-led workflows, FO depth, and special pricing for emerging managers make Altss well-suited to lean teams.

6. How many family offices does Altss include?
Altss maintains 9,000+ verified family-office profiles across North America, Europe, MENA, APAC, and LATAM.

7. Is Dakota global?
Dakota’s strength is U.S. institutional coverage and Salesforce-native workflows.

8. How often is Altss updated?
Altss maintains a ≤30-day refresh cycle across all allocator profiles, with continuous OSINT signal ingestion.

9. What kind of signals does Altss track?
Press, personnel changes, fund registrations, sector movements, filings, event patterns, portfolio shifts, and allocator visibility.

10. Who uses Altss?
Fund I–III managers, PE/VC/credit funds, family offices, secondaries teams, co-invest platforms, and emerging managers globally.