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The firm

Built by people who have been on both sides of the table.

Exalto Ventures builds operating infrastructure for private capital firms from Calgary, Alberta. The people who design the controls have signed the opinions that test them, and have raised capital under the same scrutiny they now build for.

Principal

Maxim Atanassov

Maxim is a CPA-CA with twenty-five years in the profession and licensed to sign off on SOC 2 Type 2 audits. His first SOC 2 Type 2 engagement was in 2002, which is long enough to have watched the criteria change and to know which parts of an evidence file an assessor actually reads.

He is a four-time founder, and has been Managing Partner of Future Ventures Corp, a scaleup advisory firm, since 2018. The due diligence questionnaires that arrive at a private capital firm arrive at his.

His career before this was senior advisory at Deloitte and EY, and executive leadership inside some of Canada’s largest companies. Those two vantage points are why this firm builds control environments rather than writing about them.

He hosts the Scaling with Clarity podcast.

Designation
CPA-CA
Experience
25 years
First SOC 2 Type 2 engagement
2002
Founder
Four times
Managing Partner, Future Ventures Corp
Since 2018

Market thesis

The independent sponsor market grew faster than its infrastructure did.

There are an estimated 1,400 active independent sponsors, roughly double the number in 2019. McGuireWoods, reported by Bloomberg, July 2026 The capital is there and the deals are there. What has not scaled with the count is the operational apparatus each of those firms is expected to have.

Independent sponsors account for 27% of buyers of lower-middle-market companies, and the direct deal market is growing at 53.8%. Axial and Houlihan Lokey, via Lippes Mathias, 2026 This is no longer a fringe of the market that institutions can decline to underwrite. It is a meaningful share of it, being asked institutional questions for the first time.

“The line between an independent sponsor and a fund manager is increasingly a question of infrastructure and ambition rather than capability”
McDermott, Emerging Manager and Independent Sponsor Forum, 2026

That is the whole thesis of this firm. Capability is not the constraint for the managers we work with. Infrastructure is, and infrastructure is buildable.

Team

Senior people, and not many of them.

Engagements are staffed by people who have done the work before. There is no delivery pyramid, which is also why capacity runs to four to six concurrent builds rather than as many as arrive.

{{TODO: CLIENT INPUT}} Additional team bios: name, role, one paragraph, and what they have signed or built.

Related firms

{{TODO: CLIENT INPUT}} IUVO Consulting Corp is a sister firm. It is a separate business with its own engagements, and nothing on this site is offered through it.

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