How Next Frontier Capital drives fundraising and compliance with Carta Plugins for Claude

Next Frontier Capital, a venture capital firm headquartered in Bozeman, Montana, manages four funds, including 5 SPVs. CFO Scott Holton is the sole financial operations team member and relies on Carta to reduce operational weight and support compliance as Next Frontier, founded in 2015, prepares to raise Fund V. 

Carta's Claude plugins, benchmarking, and tax services provide Next Frontier with insights and speed the firm needs to grow. As Scott develops Next Frontier’s vision for the future, Carta’s AI plugins play an important role.

Carta plugins streamline fundraising insights and outreach

Ahead of fundraising for Fund V, Scott is considering how Next Frontier can best serve current and incoming LPs. 

Typically, Scott would organize data from Carta’s Fund ERP alongside information from a third-party CRM, requiring time-consuming coordination before discovery and outreach. 

The Carta Investors Plugin overcomes the mental drain of manual data consolidation by integrating cross-surface information with Next Frontier’s real-time data on Carta. 

Scott believes the plugin has the potential to improve the fundraising process at Next Frontier. 

“I expect the Carta plugin for Claude will be the tool we’ll leverage most as we get ready for Fund V,” says Scott. “We can pull and aggregate data from all of our funds and see engagement and impact across LPs. These insights enable us to further relationships and drive satisfaction.”

Next Frontier benchmarks its funds with Carta Data Warehouse

Easier access to key data and insights is vital for Next Frontier. As part of a lean team, Scott fields a broad variety of requests for information from other staff and external partners. Carta provides visibility that reduces internal bottlenecks and enables faster decisions. 

For example, Carta's Data Warehouse gives Next Frontier live IRR, TVPI, and DPI comparisons across its own funds and against peers segmented by fund size. 

“We didn't have much benchmark data before Carta. Traditional benchmarking services don’t fit our lean operational model, so we would occasionally partner with consultants or boutique data providers, but we lacked continuous insight,” says Scott. “Carta provides real-time data across key metrics and supplements information with tools the rest of the team can use.”

Tax compliance is faster and easier with Carta 

Next Frontier also uses Carta’s tax solution for select SPVs, comparing process and outcomes against its original tax service provider.

“With Carta, we automatically submitted real-time data to the tax team and received our complete K-1s within two to three weeks,” says Scott. “It was very much accelerated compared to our outsourced team that typically does the major fund tax returns. I really appreciated the timeliness of the delivery and how easy it was for our LPs.”

As a result, Scott is considering switching all of Next Frontier’s tax work to Carta, a move that would align with his enthusiasm for Carta’s technology.

“Last year, I never thought we would be this far along on our AI journey,” says Scott. “Carta makes it much easier on me and, after spending time with the plugin and other tools, I can see Next Frontier is going to evolve because of Carta and Claude.”

Scott Holton, CFO of Next Frontier Capital, explains why he chose Carta as the "full back office tool" for four funds, four SPVs, the management company and GP entities.