In traditional private equity (PE) M&A transactions, large firms often spend millions of dollars hiring McKinsey, Bain, or Boston Consulting to conduct due diligence in order to reduce decision-making risks. Now, the startup DiligenceSquared is trying to break this high-cost barrier through AI technology. According to reports, the company, founded by former Blackstone executives and former BCG experts, recently announced a $5 million seed round led by Relentless.

The core competitiveness of DiligenceSquared lies in automating the expensive process of human interviews. In a typical due diligence process, analysts spend hundreds of hours conducting in-depth interviews with clients and executives of the target company and writing 200-page reports. DiligenceSquared uses AI voice agents to replace junior consultants to perform these interview tasks, significantly improving efficiency and reducing research costs from $500,000 to $1 million at traditional consulting firms to about $50,000.

To ensure that the quality of research does not decrease, DiligenceSquared adopts a "AI-based work + senior expert review" model. This cost-effective service allows PE firms to get involved in in-depth research at an early stage of the transaction (before making a final decision to acquire), rather than waiting until the end of the process as they did before due to high costs.

Although there are strong competitors such as Bridgetown Research (which completed a $19 million Series A funding in February 2026), DiligenceSquared has successfully attracted several global top-tier PE funds and mid-market funds as its early customers, thanks to the deep industry background of its founding team and their YC alumni status.

Key Points

  • 💰 Funding of $5 million: Led by Relentless, a new venture capital firm founded by former Index Ventures partner Damir Becirovic.

  • 🤖 AI Voice Agent Interviews: Using AI to automatically conduct complex B2B customer interviews, compressing research costs to 1/10 of the traditional model.

  • 👔 Elite Team Support: Founder Frederik Hansen previously served as a director at Blackstone, and Søren Biltoft has seven years of experience in BCG due diligence, ensuring that the commercial insights generated by AI have practical value.

  • ⚖️ Changing the Timing of the Game: The extremely low price threshold allows PE firms to obtain high-quality market data during the "low confidence phase" of the transaction.