From Sirvatus to Carta: Trevor Cook reflects on the evolution of loan operations

On October 9, 2025, Carta announced the acquisition of loan operations platform Sirvatus. After launching the company in 2019 with co-founder Michael Hays, former Sirvatus CEO Trevor Cook has joined Carta as Head of Loan Operations.

In this post-acquisition interview, Cook reflects on the inspiration behind Sirvatus and why Carta is the best place to continue building the future of loan operations. 

CARTA: Let’s go back to the beginning: Why did you build Sirvatus? 

TREVOR COOK: Sirvatus was founded out of necessity. I spent years in direct lending, structuring complicated transactions. It didn’t take me long to realize that, while investment teams had the flexibility to craft bespoke private credit deals, the operational teams managing those deals faced bottlenecks. 

Living the problem day-to-day shaped how I approached the solution. Back then, no one was building technology that could handle the complexity inherent in private credit deals —such as amendments, PIK toggles, skim interest, and pricing grids—in a scalable way. I tried every software solution on the market, but nothing was adaptable enough for the creative financing structures in direct lending. 

After seeing my peers struggle with the same inefficiencies, I set out to build the platform we all needed. It was clear that the solution had to originate from direct experience structuring and managing deals in this space. This is where both legacy vendors and the newer tech providers fell short—they didn’t understand how the deals worked in practice.

As an asset class that continues to grow in scale and importance, private credit deserves bespoke software built by someone who understands how deals operate. 

What trends did you see in the lending ecosystem, and how did they contribute to the solution you designed? 

The biggest trend is the growth of private credit as an asset class. It's now a critical source of capital for sponsored and non-sponsored middle-market businesses. Industry analysts project continued growth, with Moody’s forecasting that global private credit assets under management (AUM) will reach $3 trillion by 2028. 

The expansion of private credit AUM has fueled both creativity and complexity on the deal side, but the technology supporting loan operations has not kept up with these changes. These deals are typically held by a small number of lenders relative to the broadly syndicated loan market. This affords fund managers more flexibility to change and amend terms throughout the lifecycle of a deal. Legacy systems are just too rigid to handle the rapid evolution of financing structures.

Fast forward to 2025 and Sirvatus has just been acquired. What makes Carta a good home for Sirvatus?

Carta’s CEO, Henry Ward, and I share a similar viewpoint on the end state of private capital management. From experience as a GP, I knew how powerful it would be to have an integrated, end-to-end solution for managing a fund's entire life cycle—from assets to funds to LPs. Building Sirvatus’s capabilities into the Carta platform allows us to achieve this in a way no one else has. We have a real opportunity to displace opaque legacy solutions by delivering the next generation of loan ops technology: a modern, scalable, single-source platform.

How will having access to a single-source platform improve the way that different parties work together?

The main benefit of a centralized solution like Carta is the transparency it offers. Creating a single source of truth for an asset that different stakeholders can access eliminates the need for each party to replicate the deal in their own systems, which can lead to confusion and data discrepancies. Even for bilateral deals, having a borrower portal that shows the same payment schedule as the lender is far more efficient. 

Giving each party real-time visibility into everything from payment schedules to  documents to asset activity means no more ad-hoc data requests and uncertainty. It makes it easier for teams to operate quickly and compliantly, which in turn allows firms to scale faster and deploy capital at a higher velocity.

How does returns modeling fit into the story?

GPs use modeling to understand their investment performance, both at the asset level and a global portfolio level. There are a lot of derivative benefits too, such as cash flow forecasting and capital deployment modeling. Private credit is a high-velocity asset class from a cash movement perspective, so we can make life easier for fund controllers and CFOs by improving the precision of near-term cash flow projections. That’s why we built the modeling solution.

Modeling also helps deal teams understand the implications of potential changes, like restructures or amendments. Being able to model scenarios on top of a single source of truth makes communication with LPs and other stakeholders more transparent and efficient.

What new and upcoming features are you most excited about?

Integrating Loan Operations into Carta’s network ERP for private capital will provide immense ROI for us and our customers. From a fund accounting perspective, building this connection will increase the velocity and frequency of reconciliation, which can happen daily. We’ll be able to sync asset-level activity with a fund’s general ledger in real time, while enabling money movement and treasury management. These features are going to be huge value-drivers.

We also want to extend our modeling capabilities to the fund level, incorporating management fees, leverage, and performance fees to project net LP returns. This will give fund CFOs better visibility into cash flows and help them become more efficient operators. We're also starting to work on an AI-powered cash management recommendation engine to help private credit CFOs more intelligently balance incoming portfolio cash with capital deployment, fund financing, and distribution activity. 

How else can AI be used to improve loan operations technology?

We're very excited about the potential for AI. The current challenge with private credit is that everything needed to deliver loan operations is trapped in different documents. In the near future, we plan to launch an AI tool that ingests loan documents, summarizes the information, and extracts key deal terms. This will make the process of booking new assets and activity effortless, while also allowing us to automatically reconcile treasury and third-party agent notices against system calculations. 

Using AI to flag mismatched data and suggest what’s causing these position breaks—such as a  different credit spread or mid-period paydown—is a good short-term use case. Of course, the more sustainable way to eliminate data discrepancies is to adopt an integrated platform like Carta, which allows all counterparties to operate from a single source of truth.