American South Capital Partners evaluates 20 to 30 deals each month with a five-person originations team. As the firm grew it needed a solution to move faster.
American South Capital Partners evaluates 20 to 30 deals each month with a five-person originations team. As the firm grew from a $58 million first fund to a $174 million second fund—and began raising a $500 million third fund—it needed a faster way to move opportunities from initial review to investment committee approval.
Henry.ai helped compress that process, improve the quality of the firm’s materials, and give investment professionals greater control over how deals are presented. Tyler Epps, executive vice president and head of originations, leads a team responsible for underwriting deals, evaluating sponsors, and advancing opportunities through the firm’s approval process. He sat down with the Henry team to share his thoughts.
The team had standardized parts of its underwriting, but presentation production remained labor-intensive. A short pre-review deck could take about a week, while a full investment committee deck could take two.
That timeline created friction at a critical stage of the deal process. “From the standpoint of being a sponsor and wanting to know that we’re committed to a deal, having to wait two weeks from the time that you sign a term sheet until the time that we tell you we’re committed—that’s frustrating,” Epps said.
The work itself was highly manual. Images had to be resized, layouts checked, and every figure updated across the presentation whenever the underwriting changed
“If we got the presentation 99% there and then realized an origination fee needed to be updated, every number throughout the deck had to be manually updated,” Epps said.
American South Capital Partners considered several tools, but the team was wary of systems that produced fast output without enough accuracy or consistency.
“We’ve all used ChatGPT,” Epps said. “By the time you end up editing it or having it fix what it put out, you’re like, ‘I could have just done this manually and gotten a better result.’”
Henry stood out because the output was both polished and dependable. The platform could pull underwriting data into the right places, maintain consistency across the deck, and give the team confidence that the numbers were correct.
For Epps, that combination mattered more than speed alone. “To put all of the information into Henry and get a unified product out quickly that we know is correct, that we have confidence in, is invaluable for us.”
Henry also gave the team direct control over the process, reducing the need to hand materials off to a separate marketing resource and wait for revisions.
With Henry, a full investment committee presentation that once took two weeks can now be completed in roughly two days, including deal-specific revisions.
“We can move so much faster and be a lot more effective with the use of our time,” Epps said.
The presentation quality also improved materially. Before Henry, the team created decks in PowerPoint without a dedicated marketing professional. While the materials were primarily intended for internal review, they were sometimes shared with prospective investors.
“The look of the Henry decks is exponentially better than what we were doing before,” Epps said. “We’re excited to share them with an investor because of how nice they look.”
The team also spends less time on final review. Instead of asking multiple people to inspect every slide for formatting problems and minor errors, investment professionals can focus on underwriting, sponsor evaluation, and relationship building.
American South Capital Partners is now expanding its use of Henry through the New Deal platform, which will allow analysts to store baseline assumptions and further automate the initial underwriting process.
For a lean investment team operating at increasing scale, Henry has become a core part of the workflow.
“I can’t imagine not having Henry as part of our tech stack.”
