July 29, 2025

We Built the Diligence Platform We Wish We Had

We raised $5M from Sorenson Capital, General Catalyst, Y Combinator, and angels from Shopify and InVision to fix a problem we knew too well. PE teams move fast, but their tools haven't. So we built Keye: an AI powered diligence engine that turns messy datarooms into clean, decision-ready insights. This is the product we wish we had.

Private equity has a speed problem.

Not the speed of capital—but the speed of conviction.

Every day, deal teams face mounting pressure: more deal flow, less time, fewer resources. Deadlines tighten. Data rooms overflow. And in the middle of it all, you’re expected to extract signal from noise and walk into IC with confidence.

We know the feeling because we’ve been in your seat.

Before Keye, we were the analysts, associates, and VPs spending nights rebuilding models, wrangling messy datarooms, and racing to flag risks before it was too late. We weren’t just frustrated by the process—we were blown away by how little technology had done to evolve it.

AI was already transforming industries. But when it came to PE? It missed the mark.

Why "AI for Finance" Doesn’t Cut It

Most “AI for finance” tools today are built around document summarization. They read a CIM and a few legal documents. Maybe highlight a paragraph. Some even generate bullet points.

But summaries don’t drive investment decisions.

Real diligence demands logic, math, and context. It’s about what’s behind the numbers—retention curves, pricing vs. volume effects, cohort behaviors, and cost structure shifts that change the arc of a deal.

That’s where current tools fall short. So we built Keye to do what others don’t.

We’ve Raised $5M to Build the Diligence Engine PE Needs

We’re thrilled to announce our $5 million seed round, led by Sorenson Capital, General Catalyst, Y Combinator, and an exceptional group of strategic angels—from the COO of Shopify to the former CEO of InVision.

Many of our earliest investors were users first. They saw the product in action, felt the edge and wanted in.

This funding accelerates our roadmap: hiring top engineering talent and building out the deeper insight engine that will power every step of the investment lifecycle.

What We’ve Built

Keye transforms raw deal files—CIMs, transaction databases, excel models, financial statements, ERP system exports, customer cubes—into structured, investor-ready insights.

It’s built for one purpose: to help private equity teams get to “no” faster, say “yes” with confidence, and surface the insights others miss.

With Keye, you can:

  • Automatically extract, clean, and structure deal data
  • Analyze cohort trends, pricing vs. volume shifts, retention curves, and more
  • Export to Excel with full linked-up formulas —no hardcoding
  • Trace every insight back to its source
  • Benchmark against prior deals, instantly

This isn’t search. It’s not summarization. It’s real diligence—done in minutes, not weeks.

"As a customer of Keye, we've fundamentally evolved how deals progress through our pipeline. We have largely automated our data ingestion process and can get from the first meeting to extending a term sheet much quicker. Keye gives us the data we need to focus on the core questions of a business, especially since we can easily export all the analyses the platform builds into Excel, and we can't see ourselves going a day without it anymore." - Suril Butala, Vice President at Sorenson Capital.

Why This Matters Now

Dry powder is at historic highs. But time—not capital—is the constraint.

Most firms can only fully diligence a fraction of the deals they see. That’s not a people problem, it’s a tooling problem. And when teams can’t move fast enough, great deals get missed. Bad ones sneak through. Burnout becomes the norm.

Keye is built to change that.

Not by replacing your team, but by amplifying it. By modeling how the sharpest investors already think and giving you tools to move faster than your competitors.  

And we’re just getting started

If you’ve ever sat in front of a messy dataroom with thousands of files and thought, “There has to be a better way to do this,”? We’re building Keye for you.

We’re hiring.
We’re shipping fast.
And we’d love to show you what’s next.

Recent Blogs posted from our team

See more from our latest series on AI in the private finance space.

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