Your associates are burning Friday nights pulling first-pass diligence on companies that will not clear Monday's read. FirmOptic does the read for them, scored to your thesis, cited to the source, in about twelve minutes.
10 research credits on sign-up. No demo required.Banker books, Axial teasers, BD forwards, LinkedIn pings. By the time a target reaches a VP's inbox, a narrative has already been wrapped around it. Attractive tailwinds. Recurring revenue. Fragmented market. The team has to strip the narrative out and rebuild the picture: who owns it, how old are they, where is the real estate, what does the hiring look like, what is in litigation. None of that is in the teaser.
Somebody has to pull the state filings, the D&B, the owner's LinkedIn, the union status, the customer reviews, the permit history. Somebody has to write it up in a voice the partner will sign. Industry benchmarks put firms at roughly 80 targets reviewed per closed deal. Seventy-nine of those first looks will not close. The hours are spent anyway.
The median PE firm captures only 17.6% of relevant deal flow in its target markets. More than 80% of the companies that fit the thesis never reach the desk. Partners see the losses after the fact, in the pipeline review and the LP letter.
Industry, geography, revenue, EBITDA band, ownership profile, the soft signals that actually matter (founder age, distribution concentration, single-site operators, non-union). Edit in plain English. "Add Texas. Raise the EBITDA floor to $4M. Exclude HVAC distributors, keep service." The thesis is the asset. Everything downstream is scored to it.
FirmOptic matches your thesis against the private company universe and hands back a ranked queue. Enrichment on every row, accept or pass with a reason, feedback that sharpens the next run. An associate gets through 50 companies in an hour. Not 10. Not 20. Fifty, with a reason recorded on each one.
On every accepted company, a purpose-built agent swarm does the first read. Identity, ownership, financials, market, leadership, IP, facilities, legal, government exposure, technology. Every claim cited back to the source: state filings, D&B, LinkedIn, news, podcasts, reviews, public records. The associate reads the dossier instead of writing it.
Each company gets a multi-dimension scorecard calibrated to your thesis, not to a generic quality algorithm. Two theses on the same company can produce two different, equally correct scores, because the criteria are different. When a target clears the screen, one click produces a first-look deal memo in your firm's framing, with every section sourced and every signal tagged. You get the call you feel ready to make.
Define the mandate in your own words. Watch the queue fill. Open a company and read the first look. If it is not the first look your associate would have written at 2am, tell us and we will refund the credits.