A typical merger-and-acquisition course of is time consuming and costly, even for the biggest, well-staffed personal fairness corporations. Along with spending numerous hours assembly with senior executives of potential targets and modeling monetary outcomes, these teams spend hundreds of thousands of {dollars} on exterior advisers: accountants, legal professionals, and administration consultants.

Since bills for exterior advisers are usually not reimbursed if a deal falls by way of, PE corporations wait till they’re sure of their curiosity earlier than partaking expensive specialists resembling consultants from McKinsey, BCG, or Bain to carry out intensive industrial analysis available on the market and the goal firm.

DiligenceSquared, a startup that was a part of YC’s fall 2025 cohort, says that with the assistance of AI, it might probably present top-tier consultancy-quality industrial analysis at a fraction of the normal price.

The startup’s co-founders, Frederik Hansen and Søren Biltoft, possess deep experience in personal fairness due diligence. Hansen was previously a principal at Blackstone, the place he commissioned these experiences for a number of billion-dollar buyouts. In the meantime, Biltoft spent seven years in BCG’s personal fairness observe main these kinds of diligence efforts.  

Since launching in October, Hansen’s and Biltoft’s business expertise has helped DiligenceSquared full a number of tasks for a number of of the world’s largest PE corporations and mid-market funds, Hansen tells TechCrunch.

That early traction satisfied Damir Becirovic, a former Index Ventures companion, to steer DiligenceSquared’s $5 million seed spherical out of his new VC agency, Relentless.

As an alternative of counting on costly administration consultants, the startup makes use of AI voice brokers to conduct interviews with prospects of the businesses the PE corporations are contemplating shopping for.

DiligenceSquared is making use of the identical AI-interview mannequin seen in shopper analysis startups like Keplar, Outset, and ListenLabs, which in January raised $69 million at a $500 million valuation. However Hansen and Biltoft argue that their due diligence course of and last outputs are basically totally different from the buyer analysis produced by these startups.

PE corporations will pay $500,000 to $1 million for McKinsey, Bain, or BCG to interview dozens of company prospects, together with C-suite executives, and produce 200-page experiences synthesizing these insights with proprietary market knowledge, Hansen mentioned. To make sure the standard of the evaluation, DiligenceSquared includes senior human consultants who confirm the accuracy and industrial insights of the ultimate output.

Since AI is doing lots of the groundwork, the startup claims it might probably present the evaluation for simply $50,000.

“We’re taking these nice insights that have been beforehand reserved for the very large selections, and now we make them extra accessible,” Hansen mentioned. Due to the cheaper price level, PE corporations at the moment are much more prepared to have interaction DiligenceSquared earlier within the course of, properly earlier than they’ve excessive conviction in a deal.

DiligenceSquared isn’t the one firm attempting to disrupt the diligence market. Its major competitor, Bridgetown Research, raised a $19 million Sequence A co-led by Accel and Lightspeed in February 2026.

Along with Hansen and Biltoft, DiligenceSquared was co-founded by Harshil Rastogi, a former Google engineer.