AI due diligence software for small acquisitions.

Why small deals are different

A buyer of a small company is often one person or a two-person team. The documents are the same kinds an institutional buyer sees, a CIM, financial statements, tax returns, but nobody on staff is assigned to read them against each other. The cross-check is also where small-deal problems tend to hide, because the seller's presentation and the filed numbers were prepared by different people for different purposes.

Many small deals are financed with bank or SBA loans, so the documents must survive a lender's review as well as the buyer's own. See Deal OS for search funds and quality of earnings software for the buyer-side workflow.

What it leaves to you and your advisors

• The independent quality of earnings analysis where a lender requires it. For SBA 7(a) change-of-ownership deals at a purchase price of $3 million or more, SBA SOP 50 10 8.1 requires one from 1 October 2026 (AAFCPAs summary).
• Legal review of contracts, assignment clauses and licenses.
• The decision on price and whether to proceed.

Worked example from the sample brief

A worked example from the sample brief, a synthetic fire and life-safety inspection company:

1. A claim contradicted by the document's own table. The CIM says on page 8 that no customer is more than 15% of revenue. Page 9 lists the top account (Northgate Property Group) at $1,366,000 against $6.21M of revenue, which the brief computes as 22.0%. The brief shows both passages word for word, each with its page, and marks the page 8 statement as false on the CIM's own numbers.
2. A headline figure that two documents state differently. Trailing twelve month revenue is $6.21M on page 6 of the CIM and $5.95M as gross receipts on the tax return. The brief shows the $260K gap side by side and says to reconcile it before applying any multiple.
3. A definition that changes what a number means. Page 7 says about 78% of revenue is recurring. Page 22 defines recurring as all revenue from accounts with an active inspection agreement, including repair and call-out work. The brief flags the two passages as inconsistent and asks for a revenue cut that separates fixed inspection billings from variable work.
4. Add-backs sorted by whether they are likely to survive. The seller presents adjusted EBITDA of $1.42M. The brief itemizes the add-backs and rates each one; $90K of them are rated questionable or unlikely, which gives $1.33M that holds up on the documents. The arithmetic is computed, and the ratings are a first judgment for a human to confirm.
5. A statement the documents do not support, thrown out. While drafting, the model proposed that the company has no outstanding litigation. No passage says so, so the verifier discarded it and the brief lists it in a verification log, with a request for a 10-year litigation history instead.

The example is Sentinel Fire & Safety, Inc., a synthetic company built to show the product. Nothing in it describes a real business, and the same output shape applies to a real data room. See the whole thing at /sample-brief.