Auctor raises $20M led by Sequoia Capital
Black Diamond Advisory (BDA) is a premier OneStream implementation partner with more than 130 consultants running complex engagements across industries. For years, the firm did what most professional services organizations do: built a Center of Excellence, encouraged knowledge sharing, and relied on its people to carry what they'd learned from one client to the next. It wasn't enough.
"You can only give them what you can remember," says Vincent Valentine, Managing Director at BDA. "You always want to give every client your all, but you're always hamstrung in some way."
The problem wasn't a lack of knowledge. It was a lack of access.
Each BDA engagement generates gigabytes of information: emails, pre-sales notes, design documents, requirements documents, code extracts, PowerPoint slides, Teams chats. Across a firm of 100-plus consultants running multiple concurrent implementations, that added up to an enormous institutional archive. But it was effectively unreachable.
"You've got all this information, but you can't access it as effectively as you would like," Valentine says. "It's behind this glass wall, you can kind of see it, you know it's there, but you just can't reach it"
The math was simple and brutal: pulling consultants off billable work to share knowledge meant you effectively end up serving your clients even less. Even with best intentions, what reached any given client was only a fraction of what the firm collectively knew.
"You couldn't memorize it all if you even if you wanted to," Valentine says. "Even if you had all the time in the world, you'd never be able to read it all, retain it all, get access to it all."
The result was a quiet but constant compromise. "You ultimately had to make sacrifices," Valentine says. "You end up giving them the best you can with what you have available to you. Maybe that's 5% of what's out there. Maybe that's 2%."
The turning point with Auctor wasn't a single feature. It was a shift in how we deliver with Auctor and our understanding of how to leverage Auctor, or “Auggie” as we affectionately refer to it internally. . .
"About a month in, it really cracked wide-open for me," Valentine recalls. "Not only can I go wide, I can now also go deep."
What Valentine realized was that Auctor wasn't just a way to connect knowledge across clients. It covered the entire implementation lifecycle: pre-sales, requirements gathering, design, code development, unit testing, user acceptance testing, training materials, and admin guides, all within a single platform, all with awareness of everything BDA had built across every engagement.
"That glass wall is no longer there," he says. "I have that access immediately. Our whole team has access immediately."
One of the most immediate impacts has been during live client calls. BDA recently used Auctor during a difficult pre-sales conversation, where the platform monitored the discussion in real time, flagging unanswered questions and signaling when to shift direction.
"It actually impacted how we were conducting the call live, the whole team pivoted during the call - together, live" Valentine says. Suggestions received included: "You should move off this topic. You've said something you probably shouldn't have said. These five questions were asked and you've only answered four of them. Revisit this one."
In the old world, the team would have been managing side conversations in a Teams chat. "You couldn't keep up," Valentine says simply.
Beyond meeting intelligence, Auctor changed what BDA is able to produce. Valentine personally delivered around 20 properly branded PowerPoint presentations in a single month, alongside active coding work and ongoing sales cycles.
"Not only does Auctor produce Word and Excel and PowerPoint, it's awesome Word and Excel and PowerPoint," he says. "I can't get another AI platform to produce a Black Diamond Advisory PowerPoint that I can put in front of a client that also understands the context of the entire engagement."
But the bigger shift, Valentine argues, isn't speed. It's quality.
"It's the quality," he says. "What I've delivered to my clients has fundamentally changed. It's all different for Black Diamond Advisory."
For BDA founder Randy Werder, the value of Auctor shows up most visibly in how his people are changing.
Of the firm's over 130 consultants, only 5 to 10 had previously experienced what Werder calls an "aha moment," a genuine gut-level understanding of what AI would do to their work. Auctor has been accelerating that realization in a way other tools haven't.
"What Auctor has been able to do is expedite the aha moment among the people to understand what's coming," Werder says. "Some of these other tools are standalone and they do an okay job of that, but Auctor has really moved the needle on embracing AI and what it's actually going to do."
Part of it is the interface. Part of it is that Auctor meets consultants where they already work, across the full lifecycle of an engagement, rather than asking them to change their habits to fit a tool.
"The UI and the way that it's easy to work with has helped that," Werder says. "Not all AI tools have been able to do that."
Werder is clear-eyed that BDA's business would be changing with or without Auctor. What the platform has done is accelerate the pace and sharpen the direction.
"Has it helped me change it faster and get to my goals and objectives? The answer is yes," he says.
Valentine puts it more simply. After more than a decade in consulting, first at a Big Four firm and then at BDA, he no longer wants to work any other way.
"I can't go back. I refuse to go back," he says. "I don't want to consult any other way ever again because I just know that there's this new way of doing it that's so much better."
