Sherpany for M&A: Where Executive M&A Decisions Are Made

Every significant M&A decision, the strategic rationale that opens a programme, the deal approval, the integration oversight, the performance review, gets made in a board meeting. 

Sherpany has spent more than a decade studying how boards and executives actually make decisions, and building the technology that helps them make better ones. Now, backed by Datasite, that same discipline is being applied specifically to the organisations and dealmakers driving active M&A. 

Sherpany is where board M&A decisions are made, recorded, and kept accountable, for as long as the M&A programme depends on them. 

This article sets out what that means in practice, and why it matters more now than it used to. In it, you'll find: 

• Why Sherpany is built specifically for M&A 
• What the Board M&A Decision Gap actually is, and why it costs the majority of acquisitions the value that justified them 
• How Sherpany closes that gap, for Corporate M&A teams and Private Equity firms alike 
• What one of the industry's most experienced

Sherpany: The leading board and executive meeting platform 

Sherpany has built board and executive meeting management since 2011. The product started from a simple premise: the quality of a board's decisions depends on the quality of the meeting that produced them, the preparation beforehand, the discipline during, and what happens to the decision afterward. More than 20,000 board members and leaders now run their meetings on Sherpany, across more than 147,000 meetings held on the platform. 

That scale matters for M&A specifically. Executive M&A decisions are the highest-stakes version of a problem Sherpany has spent over a decade solving at board level generally: making sure a decision's rationale, conditions, and intent survive past the meeting where it was made. 

Backed by Datasite: Where deals are made 

Sherpany is backed by Datasite, the leading AI-powered M&A execution platform, used by dealmakers in more than 180 countries. Datasite is where a transaction gets executed: the due diligence, the data room, the AI tooling that speeds up the most document-intensive parts of a deal. 

Sherpany sits at a different point in the same lifecycle. Board decisions made in Sherpany connect to the same proprietary deal data and AI-driven insight that power Datasite's execution platform, without asking a board to change how or where it meets to get the benefit. 

"Sherpany equips M&A-focused boards to accelerate transactions through faster, more confident decision-making," says Babur Mirza, SVP of Global Sales at Sherpany. "By connecting approval, integration oversight, and review to one clear rationale, boards maintain momentum across every stage without repeatedly revisiting the basis for decisive action.." 

What is the board M&A decision gap? 

The Board M&A Decision Gap is the break between the decisions a board makes on M&A and the outcomes those decisions are meant to produce.  

Research from McKinsey, Bain, and KPMG, published across the past decade, puts the failure rate of acquisitions, measured against the value that justified them at approval, at somewhere between 50 and 85 percent. That is not a narrow miss. It’s the majority of deals falling short of what the board was told to expect when it said yes. 

The usual explanations are overpayment, cultural misalignment, integration underperformance, strategic drift. Underneath all of them sits the same mechanism: the decision that authorised the transaction and the execution that followed exist in separate information environments.  

The board approves. The integration team executes. The two rarely meet again in any structured way until someone asks, often years later, whether the deal actually worked. 

This matters more, not less, as AI enters the M&A workflow. Research commissioned by Datasite and conducted by FT Longitude in 2026 surveyed 1,000 dealmakers on exactly this question. 62 percent now say human-only decision-making in complex situations is indefensible. Only 22 percent would follow an AI-generated recommendation on whether to sign a deal. Dealmakers want better information. They are not looking to hand over the decision itself. 

We call this pattern the Board M&A Decision Gap, and we've published a full guide on where it opens and how to close it. 

Why do board M&A decisions lose impact over time?  

A board decision's impact and authority doesn’t disappear all at once, but instead erodes at three predictable points:  

• At handover: When the team that structured a deal passes it to an integration team, the board's approval conditions rarely make the journey with the deal, only the due diligence report and the financial model do. Integration priorities then get rebuilt from what the operational team assumes was intended, rather than from what the board actually approved. 
• During integration oversight: Where updates get measured against operational milestones rather than the thesis that justified the acquisition, so a board can be told everything is on track while the rationale it approved is quietly abandoned. Nobody in the room is positioned to notice, because there is no live record connecting the decision to the execution. 
• At review: Often two or three years later, when the people who presented the original case have moved on, and performance gets measured against current targets rather than what the board actually approved. The feedback loop between decision and outcome, the mechanism that would let an organisation get better at M&A over time, never closes. 

Sherpany is built to overcome these challenges: preserving the decision at approval, connecting it to oversight as integration proceeds, and making it the reference point at review, rather than something reconstructed from memory. 

"A board’s role in M&A extends far beyond approving the transaction. It must preserve the original rationale, expectations, and commitments throughout integration, ensuring the organisation remains accountable to them." says Mirza. "That sustained oversight is difficult to maintain, and precisely what Sherpany is designed to enable." 

What do better board M&A decisions mean for corporate M&A and private equity?  

For a corporate M&A team, the board sets the strategic rationale, approves the transaction, and oversees integration through to performance review. Sherpany keeps the assumptions, conditions, and intent behind that approval visible at every meeting where they matter afterward, so the decisions a board makes today are still fuelling the programme in three years, not archived in a board pack nobody consults. 

For Private Equity, the equivalent decision sits with the Investment Committee, and the equivalent risk is that the thesis approved at entry gets rebuilt from scratch by the portfolio team rather than tested against evidence. Sherpany connects Investment Committee decisions to portfolio board meetings and value creation reviews, so the conviction approved at entry is still the standard being measured at exit, across every acquisition and fund cycle. 

"An acquisition’s value may be agreed at approval, but it is realised over years of integration and review," Mirza says. "Sherpany connects board decision-making across that full journey, allowing outcomes to be assessed against the rationale and expectations the board approved." 

"Effective M&A governance cannot depend on one individual remembering every decision and commitment," Mirza adds. "Sherpany embeds that continuity into the process, keeping board decisions as the enduring reference through integration rather than rebuilding context retrospectively." 

Ready to optimise your board M&A decisions?  

The Board M&A Decision Gap report sets out where this pattern shows up across a programme, and the framework boards use to close it. The guide is free to download. 

If M&A is active in your organisation or your portfolio, see what Sherpany for M&A looks like in practice.  

FAQs about Sherpany for M&A 

Is Sherpany a data room?  

No. Sherpany does not execute transactions or store due diligence documents. It is where the board and executive committee decisions that authorise and govern a deal are made, recorded, and kept visible through integration and review. It sits alongside Datasite's execution infrastructure rather than replacing it. 

Does Sherpany replace board meeting minutes?  

Not exactly. Minutes remain the record of what a meeting discussed. Sherpany adds the layer minutes usually miss: the specific basis for a decision, its conditions, and where it needs to resurface next. 

Is this only useful for large M&A programmes?  

The underlying problem, a decision losing its context after approval, applies to any organisation with a formal board process running active acquisitions, not only the largest or most acquisitive. What scales with programme size is the cost of getting it wrong, which is why larger, more active M&A programmes tend to feel this gap most acutely.