Overview & identity
Overview and identity confirms the corporate basics — legal shape, age, ownership and scale. The first boxes on any diligence checklist, and an early chance to catch a story that does not match the pitch.
A due diligence report you can run before the real one starts. Vet a target or vendor, surface risk flags, and work a due diligence checklist against the public record — in minutes, not weeks.
Real due diligence is slow, expensive and necessary — which is exactly why you don't want to spend it on the wrong target. The problem is the order of operations: the deep review happens after you've already committed time, money and lawyers, so by the time a red flag surfaces you've sunk a fortnight into it. What's missing is a fast, cheap first pass — a way to work the obvious items on a due diligence checklist before anyone opens a data room.
A dossier is that first pass. Run it on a target or a third party and it assembles a structured public-record file: the corporate basics, ownership and leadership, the financial and funding picture as far as the record shows, the relationship web, and a dedicated risk section pulling litigation, layoffs and reputation notes to the surface. It's not a substitute for the formal due diligence report — it's the triage that tells you whether to commission one, and the head start when you do.
Five sections cover the public-record items most diligence checklists open with.
Overview and identity confirms the corporate basics — legal shape, age, ownership and scale. The first boxes on any diligence checklist, and an early chance to catch a story that does not match the pitch.
The money trail assembles funding, filings and revenue signals into a public financial picture. It frames what to ask for in the data room and flags when the public numbers and the claimed ones diverge.
People and leadership show who is actually in charge and how stable the team is. Founder departures, thin benches and recent churn are exactly the management-risk items diligence is meant to catch.
The relationship web exposes customer concentration, key partners and competitive exposure — dependency risks that are easy to miss in a deck but obvious once the connections are drawn.
The risk section is the headline: lawsuits, regulatory trouble, layoffs and reputation notes pulled forward instead of buried. This is where a first-pass file earns its keep — by surfacing a dealbreaker on day one.
A triage step that protects your expensive diligence hours.
Run a dossier the moment a target or counterparty is named — before the NDAs, before the meetings, before the spend.
Go straight to risk. Litigation, regulatory issues or sudden layoffs here can end a process before it begins — cheaply.
Map the public picture against your diligence checklist. The gaps become your request list for the data room.
Go or no-go on a sound first read — and if it is go, the dossier is the opening section of your formal diligence file.
For M&A teams screening multiple targets, a file per candidate makes the shortlist defensible: you can show why each name advanced or dropped, sourced. The same routine works for ongoing third-party risk — re-run the file on key counterparties periodically and you catch the new lawsuit or the leadership exit before it becomes your problem. Always remember the file is a starting map: confirm every material flag against the primary record before it shapes a decision.
No. It is the first-pass triage that comes before formal diligence — public-record only, fast and cheap. It tells you whether a target is worth the expensive review and gives you a head start on the checklist; the formal report, with data-room access and legal review, still has to happen.
It surfaces what is on the public record — litigation, regulatory matters, layoffs and reputation notes — with sources you can open. It will not find what has never been disclosed publicly, so treat a clean file as "nothing surfaced yet," not "all clear," and verify any flag before acting on it.
Yes. The same first-pass file works for vetting any counterparty, and because you can re-run it on demand it doubles as a lightweight ongoing-monitoring step — pull it again on key partners to catch new flags between formal reviews.
a first-pass risk file in one search.