How a PE Firm Automated Their Due Diligence Process with AI

How a Private Equity Firm Automated Due Diligence with StackAI

Overview

A leading private equity firm executed a transformative project with StackAI to transform its due diligence process. Faced with rising vendor costs, slow turnaround times, and no in-house AI expertise, the firm needed a fast, secure, enterprise-grade solution. In just two weeks, they deployed an AI-powered due diligence platform, slashing turnaround times from two weeks to five minutes, reducing costs by 80%, and enabling analysts to evaluate 33% more companies.

The Challenge: Manual Diligence Slowed by Vendors and Cost

Previously at this private equity fund, each analyst managed an Excel-based pipeline of investment opportunities. These models pulled basic financial data like P&Ls and balance sheets from public databases. But to make informed investment decisions, analysts had to enrich the file with deeper insights: business model descriptions, company websites, sustainability status, and vertical classification (for example, energy, agriculture, climate).

This enrichment process had been outsourced to a third-party vendor, but each update took two weeks and cost $2–5K. After receiving the enriched model, analysts still needed to verify every company entry, which took 5 to 10 hours weekly. This bottleneck limited the number of companies the firm could review, delayed decisions, and drained budget.

The Solution: A Multi-Agent LLM System for Due Diligence

The firm partnered with StackAI to automate the entire enrichment process using a chain of LLMs, each responsible for a distinct part of the workflow.

With StackAI’s help, they designed a batch-processing AI agent that ingests Excel files and processes each company row individually. The system pulls internal guidelines from the firm’s SharePoint to provide context, such as how to define sustainability, assess verticals, and determine investment attractiveness.

Each LLM executes its task using tailored prompts, evaluating sustainability data, extracting web information, classifying verticals, and assessing attractiveness from internal presentations or reports. The final result is an enriched Excel file, delivered within minutes, not hours. Deployed as an internal batch tool, the AI agent runs fully on the firm’s infrastructure, supporting sensitive data handling and removing the need for external vendors.

Weeks to Minutes, Vendors to In-House. What’s Next?

The new AI system has been fully adopted across the firm’s global analyst base. It reduced due diligence time by 71%, cut AI build costs by 80%, and increased the number of companies analyzed by 33%.

Analysts can now upload a list of companies and receive enriched data in under five minutes, unlocking faster decisions, better market responsiveness, and new investment opportunities.

What started as one internal use case is now sparking broader interest in AI automation across the firm. StackAI is proud to have led this workflow transformation as a valued partner.