DiligenceSquared, a New York-headquartered AI platform built to overhaul how investment teams conduct commercial due diligence, has secured $5m in seed funding in a round spearheaded by RELENTLESS, with Y Combinator joining as a participant.
The fresh capital will be channelled into accelerating the company’s growth as appetite builds among private equity firms for smarter, faster alternatives to conventional consulting engagements.
At present, funds routinely spend between $500,000 and $1m per project with firms to carry out this work. DiligenceSquared’s approach cuts through that model by combining AI voice agents, automated synthesis and a fully traceable interactive reporting interface, giving investors the ability to assess a greater number of deals, at an earlier stage, and at a fraction of the traditional cost.
The company, which began taking on clients in October, has already built a client base spanning prominent private equity and mid-market funds across the US and Europe. Those clients collectively oversee more than $2 trillion in assets under management, pointing to swift uptake across the industry.
The three co-founders each bring relevant and complementary expertise. CEO Frederik Hansen rose to principal level during a six-year tenure at Blackstone, working across the firm’s San Francisco, New York and London offices, where he was directly involved in commissioning due diligence for major buyout transactions.
COO Søren Biltoft spent seven years in BCG’s private equity division, where he led commercial due diligence assignments on behalf of blue-chip private equity and hedge fund clients. Harshil Rastogi rounds out the founding team with a decade of experience in software engineering at Google, where his work centred on building AI systems to identify and counter fraud, scams and abusive activity within the Ads division.
The platform handles the full due diligence process end-to-end. Each engagement begins with a bespoke research blueprint that maps out the key questions and market dimensions relevant to a given deal. AI voice agents then identify and engage suitable expert profiles without delay, conducting multilingual one-to-one conversations with customers, competitors and market insiders at whatever scale the situation demands.
Senior professionals with consulting pedigrees carry out quality checks across all outputs, before findings are delivered through a dynamic reporting interface that allows every insight to be traced back to its source transcript and enables instant follow-up queries via AI.
Underpinning the whole model is a deliberate combination of automation and human oversight, designed to meet the high bar that investment decisions require. Experienced project leads remain closely involved throughout, reviewing outputs and maintaining alignment with private equity standards.
DiligenceSquared co-founder and CEO Frederik Hansen said, “Commercial due diligence hasn’t changed in decades. It’s highly standardized work, executed manually, and sold at a massive markup.
“We’re using AI to automate what is repeatable and applying human review where accuracy and judgment matter. The result is faster insights, lower cost, and a level of transparency that simply isn’t possible in static PowerPoint slides.”
DiligenceSquared co-founder and COO Søren Biltoft said, “Investors won’t adopt tools that are 80–90% correct. Our model automates the heavy lifting while keeping human judgment exactly where it’s needed. It gives clients the reliability of a traditional consulting product, delivered at a fundamentally different speed and cost.”
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