Frederik Hansen knows what it's like to sign off on half-million-dollar consulting invoices. As a principal at Blackstone Private Equity, shuffling between New York, London, and San Francisco, he commissioned commercial due diligence reports the way most people order lunch—routinely, and at eye-watering cost. McKinsey, Bain, BCG: the usual suspects, charging the usual premiums.
Now he's trying to blow up that model.
DiligenceSquared, the startup Hansen co-founded with two fellow private equity veterans, just closed a $5 million seed round—led by Relentless, the venture firm launched by ex-Index Ventures partner Damir Becirovic. The deal, announced March 5, 2026, positions the company to expand its AI-powered due diligence platform, which promises to deliver commercial research reports for around $50,000. That's roughly a tenth of what traditional consultancies charge for comparable work, according to figures shared with TechCrunch.
The founding team reads like a who's who of the buy side. Hansen's co-founder and COO, Søren Biltoft-Knudsen, spent seven years leading commercial diligence projects as a principal in BCG's Private Equity practice in New York—meaning he was on the other side of those invoices. CTO Harshil Rastogi, a repeat founder, built machine learning systems for Google Ads before joining the venture. Together, they emerged from Y Combinator's Fall 2025 cohort with a thesis: AI voice agents could automate the grunt work of expert interviews, the lifeblood of M&A research.
Hundreds of Interviews, One Platform
The mechanics are straightforward, if audacious in execution. DiligenceSquared deploys AI voice agents to conduct what it describes as hundreds—sometimes thousands—of expert and customer interviews simultaneously, in any language. Every insight in its reports links back to auditable transcripts, a feature designed to satisfy the paranoia of private equity deal teams who live and die by verifiable data.
Since launching in October 2025, the team—still just three people at the time of the funding announcement, though active hiring suggests that's no longer accurate—has worked with what it claims are eight of the world's leading PE funds, collectively managing more than $2.4 trillion in assets. Those figures, disclosed on the company's Y Combinator profile, are self-reported and haven't been independently verified. Still, for a startup barely six months old, the client roster suggests something is resonating.
Use cases span the M&A lifecycle: pre-letter-of-intent screens, bolt-on acquisition validations, final-round bid sharpening. The platform is also marketed to private credit funds for underwriting purposes. DiligenceSquared touts its ISO 27001 certification, a credential that matters when material non-public information is coursing through your systems.
Perhaps more revealing is what the company doesn't emphasize: human analysts. The pitch here isn't augmentation—it's substitution.
Relentless Lives Up to Its Name
Relentless, the lead investor, has carved out a brand identity around speed and conviction. The firm claims it can deploy up to $10 million in ten days, a timeline that would give most institutional VCs heart palpitations. "Seed capital for founders doing their life's work," reads the firm's tagline. No other participants in DiligenceSquared's round were disclosed, which is increasingly common in seed deals where investors prefer to stay under the radar.
The broader market for AI-powered research tools is heating up fast. Bridgetown Research, frequently cited as DiligenceSquared's most direct competitor, raised a $19 million Series A back in February 2025—over a year ago now, which in startup time feels like an eternity. In adjacent verticals, the money is getting bigger and brasher. Listen Labs closed a $69 million Series B in January at a reported $500 million valuation. Outset, another player in the AI-driven consumer research space, pulled in $30 million in December 2025.
DiligenceSquared is betting it can differentiate by staying laser-focused on the M&A workflow, where incumbents are entrenched but expensive.
Building in Public, Sort Of
The company is currently hiring founding engineers in New York, with compensation packages ranging from $140,000 to $250,000 in salary plus equity grants between 0.30% and 1.30%. That's competitive for early-stage startups, though not exactly Goldman Sachs money—a deliberate trade-off, presumably, for engineers willing to bet on equity upside.
There's a slight geographic ambiguity at play. DiligenceSquared lists San Francisco as its headquarters on Y Combinator's site, but job postings skew heavily toward New York, where two of the three founders have deep roots. It's possible the company is straddling both coasts, or simply hasn't updated its mailing address. Either way, the New York presence makes sense given the concentration of private equity firms there.
What remains to be seen is whether DiligenceSquared can scale its model without sacrificing the quality that justifies its price point—even at a 90% discount. Voice AI has come a long way, but M&A professionals are notoriously skeptical. They've seen software demos before. They've also seen deals blow up over missed signals in due diligence.
Hansen and his co-founders are wagering that their insider credibility—and a significantly lighter invoice—will be enough to get them in the room. After that, the AI will have to do the talking.
