How Two Startup Funds Cut Deal Diligence to Under 4 Hours

Two early-stage investment funds, one private equity and one venture capital, were seeing deal flow grow faster than their analysts could keep up. Each first-pass diligence review took 40 to 60 analyst hours: reading the data room, researching the company and writing up a view against the fund's criteria. With small teams, every extra hour of diligence meant a deal that never got a proper look.

Portfolio Leverage built DueDrill, an AI due diligence platform that produces a structured first-pass review against each fund's own framework. The review covers 16 categories and 214 fields. Each category is scored with a weighted rubric, and the scores roll up into an overall verdict ranging from Strong Pass to Hard Pass. The output is an investment-committee-ready memo with cited, editable fields, available as a live web view, a PDF and a shareable link. Analysts review and refine the AI's first pass instead of building it from scratch, and the model used for each category can be switched between providers.

The build started with the rubric, written by hand before any code: 16 categories, 214 fields and the weights that decide how each one counts. Next came a single AI layer wrapping Claude Sonnet 4.5, GPT-5 and Gemini 2.5 Pro, with shared request handling and structured-output shims so any category can run on any model. A scoring engine rolls category scores into a weighted overall score mapped to verdicts from Strong Pass to Hard Pass. One section definition drives three outputs, the live report, the PDF and the share link, so they never drift apart. Authentication, access controls and rate limits came last, along with logging of every AI call and analyst override. The build took about six weeks. The hardest problems were operational: provider configs that had drifted apart, share links that broke on a read-only production filesystem, and auth checks that needed strict timeouts. The core lesson was that the rubric is the product and the model is plumbing.

Small PE and VC funds, search funds and corporate development teams whose deal flow has outgrown analyst capacity, and who already have, or can write down, a clear framework for what makes a deal worth pursuing. It works best when analysts stay in the loop to review and refine the first pass.