M&A teams, in-house and boutique
The letter of intent is signed, the data room has been open since yesterday. On Thursday you sit down with three division heads who all want to know something that is in those folders. Two more targets are running alongside.
Only if you want it, a closed deal on which you can see what AIMI reads out of it and what it names as missing.
Where each number comes from stands at the number.
The third stage
Every review goes through the same three stages. First: is the document in the data room. Second: does it meet the requirement, is the version recent enough. Third: is what it refers to or presupposes on file. The notarial deed that names a register. The sign-off against a condition. The second permit beside the first.
The first two stages are within reach of any document list. The third is the one where it gets expensive.
An operation that requires a permit was bought along with the rest. Two years later it came out that only one of the two competent authorities had ever granted a permit. When somebody looked, the operation was shut down. A side point of the transaction had turned into a money pit.
Nothing had been missing from the document list. What was missing was the document nobody asked for.
Corporate law, state of the chain
How it runs today, without AIMI
The deal is not the problem. It is the weeks in which the transaction waits for information that lies scattered all over the house.
Your colleague knows the plant, not the data room. Before he can judge, he has to work through official notices, expert reports and minutes, and for that work there is nothing in his calendar.
You hear nothing for two weeks, then a question comes back. Until then the transaction waits, and all of it is coordinated on the side.
Nobody wants to sit in front of division heads without an answer. Without a solid basis things get postponed, queried and passed on, and every round costs a week.
With the last target it was one plant, this time it is sites held on leases. What particulars such a lease needs, where in the house the documents for it sit and who can judge them professionally: that stands in no handbook, and looking it up costs time that is not there between two meetings.
One document names one floor area, another names a different one, and both are signed. Anyone who wants to see that has to hold both versions in mind at once, and the ten thousand other pages beside them.
The same kind of gap sits in bad scans: every second page missing, because somebody turned the pages too fast at the copier. A signature disappears under a stain. The data room looks complete and, in the middle of a document, is not.
At the end it is always the same request to the department: please check this. Whether a plant is permitted, whether a site is allowed to do that, whether the technical requirements are met. One sentence, written in thirty seconds, and behind it two weeks of work for somebody who has none.
In four steps
The route follows your process. It begins with what can collapse the transaction.
ZIP, SharePoint or drag and drop. Archives are unpacked.
Three stages: document there, requirement met, reference on file.
Every finding with the place in the original, pre-sorted by topic area.
Your structure, your tables, your logo. You review, you sign off.
The hour before the first target
AIMI brings a fixed review path with it, topic area by topic area. That is the beginning, not the result. Every target is different, and your house reviews things that stand in no standard grid.
So we sit down together for an hour before the first target runs: you bring two completed transactions, your Q&A lists and the report your board read at the end. Out of that comes the grid for your house. What you put in stays inside your company: nothing comes in from the target next door, and certainly nothing from the house next door.
With every completed transaction the grid gets sharper. What goes into it is decided by you, not by us.
A description of what is actually there
Target defined, the requirements go out, the data room comes back, then the Q&A rounds. Nothing about that order changes. AIMI works inside it: read, compare, name what is missing.
What was delivered and what was not stands before the first Q&A round, not after it.
Buy side: AIMI holds the incoming data room against the list you requested, and against the review grid from your own earlier transactions. Out of that comparison comes a draft for the next Q&A round. You change it, you release it.
Sell side, in a vendor due diligence: the same review, looking the other way. You find what is missing before the bidder finds it and prices it in. If several bidders run in parallel, every round stays assigned to its own circle, and the answer stands ready with its source, no matter who asks it for the third time.
The connection runs by ZIP, SharePoint or drag and drop, unpacking included. A portfolio out of an insolvency with 50 GB ran through in one piece. Index lists and exports from the common data room providers we reconcile against.
AIMI describes with its source what is there, and marks what is missing against the review grid.
The condition attached to a permit (Auflage) with no sign-off against it, the official notice (Bescheid) with no evidence attached, the expert report a contract refers to and nobody supplied. Your department gets a finished draft on the desk and gives its professional judgement, instead of working through paper. What is meant is the reading: nobody wants to replace the professional judgement, it only becomes possible in the time that was set aside for it.
AIMI recognises missing pages, a missing signature, a missing stamp, handwriting in an annex. And it holds documents against each other: if an expert report speaks of different figures than the contract, the contradiction stands there in chronological order, with the place in the original.
Departments, lawyers and surveyors work from the same reading of the same documents, instead of each on their own extract.
You release who has access to what, per project and per topic area, and take the access back once a contribution is done. That applies to your own departments just as much as to the lawyers, surveyors and auditors you bring in.
For the corporate law review there are eleven topic areas, among them corporate law with the chain of title and transfer restrictions (Vinkulierung), employment law, IP, public-law permits, subsidies, litigation and insurance. Every finding is pre-sorted. Whether it goes into the contract as a warranty, an indemnity, a condition precedent or a price adjustment is decided by your lawyers and your advisors.
The facts, the source and the open points on one page, so that a decision can be taken instead of postponed.
Word, PowerPoint or Excel, with the logo, colours and structure of your house. AIMI fills the chapters it was given following your structure, instead of composing freely, and takes your earlier templates as the pattern. Exactly one thing is taken away from the AI here: its creativity.
Same facts, different structure. Who gets what in which form, from a division head to the shareholder circle, you decide.
The contents of the transactions stay strictly separated from one another, and the review grid still gets sharper with every one.
Two things are separated that often get confused: the separation by company and project inside the platform, and who in your house sees which project at all. Access you steer per project, with visibility levels and a project lead role.
The grid gets sharper through rules and templates from your own completed projects, inside your own company. Nothing comes in from the target next door, and certainly nothing from the house next door.
Open conditions, outstanding reviews and deadlines stand there with their source, even when the team has moved on.
What follows from the data room stays retrievable: which reviews are open, which conditions were named, which deadlines are running, what is on the table in merger control. Every deadline stands as it is named in the document. That is the read body of documents your integration planning draws on, and not the planning itself: the steps are yours to set.
You put questions to the whole body of documents, every answer with a highlighted source. If your house already works with an assistance system, you fetch the answers there, read only and separated by company. What happens to the content in third-party systems lies with their providers and with you; our undertakings apply to AIMI. In Outlook and Word you answer an email or fill a chapter without switching windows.
What the head start is worth
A law firm used to need twelve working days for the legal due diligence. With AIMI it stood in five, with a comparable volume of files. Its client went into the negotiation correspondingly earlier.
The partner described it to us in substance: his client was surprised how early it was possible to negotiate. Not a verbatim record, which is why it stands here without quotation marks.
One real mandate at a law firm, not a figure from an in-house team and not a generalised metric. On request we arrange the contact for a reference call under confidentiality.
In everyday work something smaller takes effect faster: whoever has the information straight away plays the ball back in the same move, instead of leaving it lying. The transaction stays in motion, and nobody stands in the process as the bottleneck.
Where AIMI stops
It describes what is actually there and evidences every statement with its source. What it does not find in the documents it reports as a gap, instead of estimating it.
Where a surveyor, an auditor or a lawyer carries the liability, AIMI works for the person who signs.
What never reached the data room is in no file, not in ours either. That is exactly why the list of gaps is the first output and not the last.
Your data room stays where it is, AIMI works on a copy inside your company. If a bidder drops out or a deal collapses, you get the return or deletion of that copy confirmed in writing, with a deadline.
No annual contract and no user licences: whether ten people have access or two costs nothing extra. You pay for what is processed, from a balance you set in advance.
A target that runs alongside for years costs what it reads, not what it stores. We give you the order of magnitude for your case after a short look inside, in the first conversation and not after three meetings.
Before the first document is uploaded
What is evidenced stands here. Where the proof is missing, that stands here just as plainly.
In European data centres only, separated by company. The data centres are operated by Microsoft, AWS and Google; which contract carries which undertaking we put in front of your IT in writing. Your templates and your rules stay inside your company. No model is trained on your data, neither ours nor a provider’s.
Yes, completely, at a group of companies with several hundred employees. Instead of talking about it here, we go through your requirements list point by point, in writing, before you decide. On request we will put you in touch with a house that has been through the process with us. What your IT needs for the approval we put forward in writing, before you decide.
At upload, automatic redaction can be switched on per project, and the original stays secured. What your IT needs for the approval we disclose before a single document is uploaded.
You get the return or the deletion confirmed in writing, together with a deadline. In a bid process this question comes first, which is why it stands here up front and not in the small print. Tell us which deadline your house requires, and you have the answer in writing before you decide.
Small enough for a single target. You see your credit balance at any time, and what a run has used up.
How a project starts, from the first meeting to routine operation, stands on a page of its own: How a project starts.
Because a data room is not a conversation. A chat window answers what somebody asks. What nobody asks, nobody finds there either. AIMI instead works through a fixed review path, topic area by topic area, and reports what nobody was looking for as well.
A managing director who uses such assistants himself puts it this way: “We have AI assistants in use, but only for single documents. That runs into its limits quickly. I have a 2000 page structural report, and I had to reshape it laboriously.”
To begin with, a template you normally report in and a data room you have already worked through are enough. Connecting takes hours, the reading runs in the background, setting it up is done in a day. How long an approval takes in your house is decided by your IT and not by us.
The first target runs alongside your usual way of working until your team trusts the result.
The fastest way to understand AIMI is a closed deal whose data room you have already worked through. On a case you can judge yourself, you see what AIMI reads out of it, what it names as missing and where it stays silent because the evidence is not there.
One deal is enough for you to judge for yourself.