Startup Evaluation Engine
A packaged evaluation report per deal — automated financial-model review and cap-table analysis, founder-background research with structured outputs, market-size triangulation, comparable-company benchmarking. Delivered as a partner-readable document for the investment committee.
- Engagement
- 1–2 week sprint per evaluation · packaged report
- Built for
- Partners · Principals · Investment committee
Once a deal is in process, the principal-level evaluation work is a person-week per deal — financial model review, cap-table analysis, founder-and-team background, market-size triangulation, comparable-company benchmarking. Across a pipeline of even five active deals, that's the whole quarter gone.
What this is
A productized DD engagement per deal. Four sections in every report:
- Financial model review. Math validation, internal consistency, anchored against comparable-company benchmarks for the key assumptions (growth rate, gross margin, sales efficiency, churn).
- Cap-table and dilution analysis. Current cap table, anticipated dilution through the round and the next two, founder-employee ownership trajectory, option-pool sizing.
- Founder and team background. Structured profile of the founders and key hires, prior-company history with outcomes, who-they-worked-with graph.
- Market and comparables. Market-size triangulation across sources, comparable-company benchmarking on metrics relevant to the stage and sector.
How it's built
Excel and Google Sheets parsing for the financial model layer, document AI for cap-table extraction, public-source research stack for founder background (same infrastructure powering Founder Network Intelligence), comparable-data sourcing through the same data infrastructure feeding the Deal-Sourcing & Signal Platform.
What you get
- The packaged evaluation report — partner-readable, IC-document-ready.
- The structured datasets behind the report (cap-table table, comparable-company table, founder-background structured profile).
- A working session with the partners to walk findings before the partner meeting with the founders.
Engagement is shape, not list.
Length and price are functions of the data and the destination. The shape below is the typical engagement.
- Length
- 1–2 week sprint per evaluation · packaged report
- Lead
- Bogdan
- Cadence
- Async, weekly
- Bar
- Production
Scoped during the discovery call against the actual data and the operation it integrates with.
Principal engineer. Architecture and most code ships through one keyboard.
Written updates between, calls when the decision needs the room.
Async correctness, capacity under burst, observability at every boundary.
Products this composes with.
Same suite, or vertical-specialized versions in another.
- Same suite · Venture Capital Suite
Deal-Sourcing & Signal Platform
A scoring pipeline that complements PitchBook and Affinity — ingests startup-database structured data plus unstructured signals (technical hiring, GitHub activity, product launches, supplier-relationship graph), applies your fund's thesis-specific scoring, and feeds your CRM weekly.
- Same suite · Venture Capital Suite
Founder Network Intelligence
A people-level tracking layer — monitors departures from a curated 'talent watchlist' of notable companies, surfaces clusters and individuals to the partners with context (role, tenure, who they worked with), refreshes daily.
What buyers ask about this one.
What's the technical-DD piece for software targets?
For software companies that warrant code-level technical diligence, we route to the PE Suite's Technical DD Engine — that engagement is shaped specifically for the deeper code review. Most VC-stage evaluations don't need the full Technical DD scope; the Startup Evaluation Engine includes the lighter-touch technical posture review.
How accurate is the financial-model review?
Standard model anomalies (math errors, internally inconsistent assumptions, circular references, suspicious revenue-growth assumptions relative to comparable companies) are caught reliably. Subtle modeling judgment (whether the founder's customer-cohort assumptions are realistic given their actual traction) gets surfaced for the partner to review with the founder.
What's in the founder-background research?
Public-source profile (LinkedIn, GitHub, prior-company history, publications, conference talks), structured representation of who-they-worked-with, prior-company outcomes for any companies the founder has founded or been an early hire at. Where the partner asks for deeper screening, we route to the PE Suite's Diligence Red-Flag Engine for the sanctions and beneficial-ownership layer.
How long does this take per deal?
Sprint runs 1–2 weeks from data-room access to packaged report. The partner can read the report and use it as the IC document baseline; the strategic framing and the founder-meeting impressions stay with the partner.
Pricing?
Per-evaluation, scoped to depth requested. Discovery call covers the deal volume and the evaluation depth.
If the deliverable matches the gap, the next step is one call.
We'll scope length and price against your data and the operation it integrates with. No retainer, no fishing.
Bogdan and team · async-first · OP—2026