DiligenceSquared Raises $5M to Bring AI-Driven Commercial Due Diligence to Private Equity

New AI-native platform conducts expert interviews, synthesizes findings, and delivers fully traceable diligence reports traditionally produced by consulting firms

NEW YORK, March 6, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- DiligenceSquared, an AI-native platform that automates commercial due diligence and market research for investment teams, today announced a $5 million seed round led by RELENTLESS, with participation from Y Combinator. The funding will support the company's rapid expansion and growing demand among private equity firms.

DiligenceSquared's platform replaces traditional consulting workflows that private equity funds typically purchase from leading consulting firms such as McKinsey, BCG and Bain for $500K to $1M per project. Using AI voice agents, automated synthesis, and an interactive reporting interface with full source traceability, the platform enables investors to evaluate more opportunities, earlier in the process, and at materially lower cost.

The launch comes as private equity funds are increasingly questioning the speed, cost, and opacity of traditional consulting-led diligence, creating a major opening for AI-native approaches that can operate at greater scale and transparency.

Since launching in October, the company has already completed engagements with several leading private equity firms and mid-market funds across the U.S. and Europe, representing more than $2 trillion in combined assets under management. Their rapid adoption highlights a broader industry shift: commercial due diligence remains highly manual, labor-intensive work that has seen little meaningful innovation in decades, making it one of the categories most primed for AI-driven transformation. 

The founding team Frederik Hansen, Søren Biltoft, and Harshil Rastogi bring deep senior-level experience across private equity, consulting, and large-scale AI systems. Hansen spent six years at Blackstone rising to Principal on the firm's private equity team across San Francisco, New York and London where he purchased commercial due diligence reports for billion-dollar buyout deals. Biltoft was a Principal in BCG's Private Equity practice, and spent 7 years leading commercial due diligence projects for blue-chip private equity and hedge fund clients. Rastogi comes with a decade of software engineering experience, most recently from Google, where he led efforts on AI systems that detect fraud, scam, and abuse in the Ads division.

"Commercial due diligence hasn't changed in decades. It's highly standardized work, executed manually, and sold at a massive markup," said Frederik Hansen, co-founder and CEO of DiligenceSquared. "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."

Hansen's view is shared by early investors who see the category as ripe for modernization and scale.

"This team brings a rare combination of deep domain expertise, technical strength, and firsthand experience purchasing and relying on traditional commercial due diligence," said Damir Becirovic, Founding Partner at Relentless. "They understand exactly where the inefficiencies are and have built an AI-first approach that delivers speed, transparency, and rigor in a way the traditional consulting model can't. We believe this will become the new standard for how investment teams run diligence and have integrated their product in our own processes."

How the Platform Works
Advances in voice AI now make it possible to run dozens or even hundreds of expert interviews in parallel, eliminating one of the biggest bottlenecks in commercial due diligence. DiligenceSquared automates the entire workflow, from sourcing to synthesis, in a way that traditional consulting firms can't match:

• Research blueprint – defines the key questions and market angles investors need answered, tailored to each deal
• Instant expert access – sources targeted profiles and engages them immediately through AI voice agents
• Multilingual AI interviews – conducts 1:1 conversations with customers, competitors, and market insiders at any volume, without scheduling bottlenecks
• Human-quality assurance – applies senior consulting judgment to verify nuance, accuracy, and commercial relevance
• High-scale synthesis – transforms thousands of datapoints into clear market views, competitive dynamics, and customer insights in hours, not weeks
• Interactive, traceable reporting – replaces static PDFs with a platform where every insight can be clicked back to the original transcript, and follow-up questions can be answered instantly via AI

A Hybrid AI + Human Model Built for Investment Teams
The platform combines AI automation with human-in-the-loop oversight to meet the rigor required for investment decisions. Project leads with top-tier consulting backgrounds provide white-glove support, review all key outputs, and ensure consistency with private equity standards.

"Investors won't adopt tools that are 80–90% correct," said Søren Biltoft, co-founder and COO of DiligenceSquared. "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."

For more information about DiligenceSquared please visit www.diligencesquared.com.

About DiligenceSquared
DiligenceSquared is an AI-powered platform that automates commercial due diligence and market research for investment teams. By combining AI moderated expert interviews, automated synthesis, human-in-the-loop quality review, and an interactive report with full source traceability, the company enables firms to evaluate more opportunities, earlier, and with deeper confidence. The company was founded by senior profiles from Blackstone, BCG, and Google and is headquartered in New York. DiligenceSquared is backed by Relentless, Y Combinator, Amino Capital, Founder Factor, Multimodal Ventures, Twenty Two Ventures, and select angel investors.

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SOURCE DiligenceSquared