United States Seattle, USA · Corporate development
Acquisition diligence on an AI startup for a corporate buyer
A corporate acquirer needed to know what it was really buying beneath an impressive AI demo.
Service: AI Diligence for Investors Illustrative case study. Representative of our work and anonymized. It does not name a client, and the outcome is described qualitatively.
The challenge
The buyer was evaluating an acquisition where much of the value rested on AI claims that were hard to verify from the outside.
What we did
- Separated the genuinely proprietary technology from what was a layer over third-party models.
- Assessed key-person risk and whether the team could build the next version.
- Flagged integration and cost realities the deal model had not accounted for.
The outcome
The acquirer entered final negotiations knowing exactly what was durable, what was fragile, and what to protect post-close.