CYNDX alternatives: replacing discovery, private-market data and workflow

Executive Summary

For most of the past five years Cyndx occupied a distinctive position in the deal-sourcing market: an AI-first private-company intelligence platform that combined a 31–33 million-company dataset, semantic "find companies like this one" discovery, investor matching and, latterly, generative research and valuation modules — priced in the mid-five-figure range per firm [7][9][17]. That position changed with the wind-down announcement, which the original manuscript dated 20 August 2026; the currently displayed letter is undated. In the letter, founder and CEO Jim McVeigh attributed the decision to financing and market conditions that prevented further scaling, and said the company would wind down and dissolve [1]. Any Cyndx customer, and any team that had Cyndx on a shortlist, now has a forced buying decision.

The core insight of this comparison is that no single product replaces Cyndx one-for-one, because Cyndx straddled three categories that the rest of the market keeps separate. Buyers should decide which of the three jobs actually mattered to them and buy accordingly:

• Private-market data depth — transaction histories, investor networks, sponsor ownership, comparables. This is where PitchBook and S&P Capital IQ Pro remain the institutional benchmarks, at $15,000–$30,000 per seat or more [64][65][66][67][69].
• AI-native target discovery — describing a thesis in plain language and receiving a ranked universe of founder-owned, lower-middle-market companies that keyword databases miss. Grata (now with Sourcescrub, under Datasite), Inven and CorpDev.Ai compete here, with very different data and pricing models [42][43][80][30].
• Workflow and deliverables — pipeline CRM, monitoring, memo and deck generation, data-room analysis. CorpDev.Ai bundles this into a $1,000–$3,000 per month subscription; Midaxo and DealCloud sell it as enterprise process software; Affinity and 4Degrees sell the relationship-CRM slice [28][89][91][100].

Our verdict by buyer type: a corporate development team of one to five people that valued Cyndx for thesis-driven discovery and wants the surrounding workflow should shortlist CorpDev.Ai and Grata and run a paired pilot. A PE origination team with a mature CRM should go straight to the Datasite (Grata + Sourcescrub) combination and negotiate hard on seat and export terms. Any team that used Cyndx primarily for transaction comps and investor data should accept that it needs PitchBook or Capital IQ Pro and budget accordingly. A team on a tight budget can pair Crunchbase Pro or Dealroom with a general-purpose AI assistant, but should not expect Cyndx-grade discovery.

Identify which function mattered, then pilot two candidates on 25–50 known targets. CYNDX is historical context: its official site announces wind-down and dissolution, checked 14 September 2026, without an announcement date. It is not an active purchasing recommendation. CYNDX official site.

Why This Comparison Matters: The Deal-Sourcing Software Landscape in 2026

The corporate development technology market is not a single category but a stack assembled from four layers: private-market data and discovery; relationship and deal CRM; workflow and transaction management; and an AI research layer that increasingly sits across all three [103][107]. The prevailing buying pattern in 2025–2026 is not "replace the CRM with an AI agent" but a chain — data provider, AI-assisted discovery and qualification, CRM record, human-approved outreach, then workflow, diligence and reporting [107][109].

Three structural shifts define the 2026 landscape and explain both Cyndx's demise and where its customers should look next.

First, consolidation around execution platforms. Datasite acquired Grata on 3 June 2025 with a stated $500 million investment commitment, acquired Sourcescrub from Francisco Partners on 8 August 2025 with the explicit intent of merging it into Grata, and acquired Valu8 on 8 May 2026 to add coverage of roughly 70 million European companies [42][43][47]. The strategic logic is to connect sourcing intelligence to the virtual data room where deals are executed. For buyers, the consequence is that two of the strongest independent discovery platforms are now one roadmap owned by a data-room vendor — a scale advantage, but also a transition risk for legacy features, export rights and pricing.

Second, AI has moved from summary to agent. Grata launched "Agentic Search" in late 2025 [50][102]; CB Insights launched a "Team of Agents" for M&A and deal sourcing in June 2025 [110]; S&P added ChatIQ and Document Intelligence to Capital IQ Pro [69][76]; PitchBook added AI profile and transcript summaries and a VC Exit Predictor [75]; CorpDev.Ai built its entire product around an AI analyst agent [27][30]. Bain found that 45% of M&A practitioners used AI in 2025, more than double the prior year, though only about a third use it systematically [103]. McKinsey reports that 40% of generative-AI users in M&A saw deal cycles shorten by 30–50% [107][108]. Gartner simultaneously warns that more than 40% of agentic AI projects will be cancelled by end-2027, largely for unclear ROI and "agent-washing" [112][113]. The practical buyer question is therefore no longer "does it have AI?" but "does the AI perform multi-step work with traceable sources, or does it summarise?"

Third, the economics have bifurcated. Institutional data terminals remain quote-based at $15,000–$30,000 per seat [64][65][66]; enterprise deal platforms run from $85,000 to over $500,000 annually [106]; and a new tier of transparent, sub-$50,000 AI-native tools — CorpDev.Ai at $12,000–$36,000 per year, Dealroom at $14,500–$20,000, Affinity at $2,000–$2,700 per user — has appeared underneath them [28][87][100]. Cyndx, priced in the $30,000–$60,000 band with roughly $10.5 million of total funding [4][17], was squeezed between the scale players above and the transparently priced challengers below. Its founder's own explanation — a financing environment that did not permit scaling — is consistent with that position [1].

Evaluation Framework

Each platform is assessed against eight criteria that reflect how corporate development, strategy and M&A teams actually derive value, rather than headline feature counts.

Cyndx: Profile and Assessment

What Cyndx Was

Cyndx Networks was a privately held, West Palm Beach-based financial technology company founded and led by Jim McVeigh, who also ran the affiliated TMT-focused advisory boutique CDX Advisors [2][5]. It raised approximately $10.5 million in total, with Rakuten Capital as its principal disclosed institutional investor following a June 2018 investment [3][4]. The company positioned itself as "purpose-built AI for dealmakers" — proprietary company, investor, ownership and transaction data combined with machine learning and NLP, rather than a general chatbot layered over web search [15].

The product evolved from three modules to six. Finder provided ML-driven semantic company search, market mapping and comparable discovery; Raiser matched a specific capital raise to likely investors based on historical transaction behaviour; and Owner, launched in September 2021, was a self-service cap-table tool priced at $0–$85 per month [6][8][10][11][18]. By March 2026 Cyndx was promoting a broader AI-driven M&A workflow adding Acquirer (predictive acquisition targeting), Valer (DCF, comparables and precedent-transaction valuation) and Scholar (generative research and due-diligence reports), all built on a dataset it described as covering more than 31 million companies; by mid-2026 it had introduced a conversational assistant, "Cyndy", and cited approximately 33 million companies [7][26].

Coverage, AI Approach and Pricing

Cyndx's marketing claimed 31–33 million companies across 195 countries, 60,000-plus public companies and approximately 80 million investor contacts, with Raiser analysing "billions of data points" from millions of historical transactions [9][12][13][14]. The variation in the headline company count across pages reflected database growth rather than an audited figure, and the "80 million investors" figure is best read as contact records rather than distinct institutions [9]. The AI approach combined semantic similarity search, predictive fundraising signals, transaction-pattern matching for investor and acquirer recommendations, and generative synthesis in Scholar [7][15][26]. Public materials never disclosed precision, recall or freshness benchmarks.

Enterprise pricing was never published. Third-party estimates placed a firm licence at roughly $30,000–$60,000 per year depending on seats and module mix [16][17]. On G2, Cyndx held a 4.6/5 rating from 20 reviews; users praised speed in identifying relevant market participants and building prospect lists, and criticised incomplete CRM integration, a learning curve and "growing pains" on a broad platform [23][24].

Why It Matters for Buyers Today

For former Cyndx customers, the immediate priorities are practical: export every saved list, search and generated report before access ends; confirm whether any acquirer of Cyndx's IP or team intends to relaunch a product (the founder's letter references such interest [1]); and treat the replacement decision as an opportunity to fix the CRM-integration gap that Cyndx users consistently reported. The sections that follow assess the realistic replacements.

The Alternatives

CorpDev.Ai

Positioning. CorpDev.Ai is the closest philosophical successor to Cyndx's late-stage vision — an AI-native operating system for corporate development rather than a database — but it arrives at that position from the workflow side rather than the data side. Its organising concept is an AI Analyst Agent that researches companies and markets, screens targets against a thesis, and produces the deliverables a corp dev team actually ships: target profiles, market maps, investment memos and presentations [27][28]. Around the agent sit a "zero-entry" pipeline CRM fed by Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace email and calendar sync, target monitoring and alerts, and a data-room capability that ingests source files (including scanned documents) and answers questions with page-level citations [27][32][33]. The company is led by founder and CEO Kal Kilpi and describes its architecture as multi-model orchestration across OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity and Google models [28][35].

Discovery and data. Sourcing is natural-language: the user writes an acquisition thesis in business terms and the system interprets it semantically, queries multiple AI models and company sources, deduplicates and validates results, enriches them with firmographics, and assigns strategic-fit scores [30]. The firmographic backbone is a licensed Apollo database of 70 million-plus companies supplemented by geographic search via Google Maps, people search, and on-demand AI research for companies not already indexed [28][29][30]. This is a fundamentally different data model from Cyndx, PitchBook or Grata: CorpDev.Ai does not maintain its own curated transaction, investor or private-financials dataset. It aggregates public sources — company websites, filings, press, news, third-party providers — with source citations attached [28]. That makes it strong for identifying and profiling a target universe and weak, relative to the incumbents, for precedent-transaction comps, sponsor ownership histories and underwriting-grade private financials.

Pricing. CorpDev.Ai is among the vendors in this comparison with published team-level pricing: AI Pro at $1,000 per month invoiced annually ($1,200 by card) for one user with 12,000 annual search credits; AI Pro Team at $3,000 per month ($3,600 by card) for three users, a dedicated customer success manager and 36,000 credits; and a custom-quoted Enterprise tier adding unlimited users, SSO, a solutions architect, financial modelling and managed services [28]. All tiers include the CRM, integrations, data-room and document generation. The company states SOC 2 Type II compliance, encryption at rest and in transit, and a commitment that customer data is not used to train models [28]. A free trial is offered [34].

Evidence base. The public customer evidence is thinner than for the incumbents. The pricing page claims use by "hundreds of CorpDev professionals" and S&P Global's May 2026 hyperscaler case study describes Capital IQ Pro's own AI features and does not identify CorpDev.Ai as a supplier. It therefore supplies no independent customer validation for CorpDev.Ai and there is no logo list or independent review corpus comparable to Grata's 79 G2 reviews [28][36][45].

PitchBook (Morningstar)

Positioning. PitchBook, owned by Morningstar, is the institutional benchmark for private-market data and the default choice when a corporate development team's target universe is venture- or sponsor-backed. It is a data terminal first and a discovery tool second: its value lies in knowing who financed a company, at what valuation, with which co-investors, and which strategic or financial buyers have acquired similar assets [67][71][72].

Coverage. PitchBook's own materials cite roughly 5–6 million companies, more than 2.5 million deals — including approximately 478,000 strategic M&A transactions, 754,000 venture investments and 314,000 private-equity investments — and 535,000–570,000 investors and 140,000–147,000 funds, with profiles averaging more than 200 data points and datasets updated six times daily [67][68][70][71][72][73][78]. The company universe is an order of magnitude smaller than Cyndx's 33 million or Capital IQ's 60 million-plus, and that is the design: PitchBook curates depth on transactionally relevant companies rather than breadth across every registered entity. For a founder-owned regional manufacturer that has never raised outside capital, PitchBook coverage is often thin or absent — a gap Grata and Inven were built to fill.

AI. PitchBook's AI layer is workflow-oriented: AI-generated company profile summaries, earnings-transcript summaries with highlights and Q&A extraction, a VC Exit Predictor that scores the likelihood of acquisition or IPO, and integrations with external LLM tools including Perplexity and Hebbia [75]. It does not offer thesis-to-shortlist agentic sourcing of the kind Grata and CorpDev.Ai market, nor generative memo drafting.

Pricing. Quote-based; PitchBook states only that price varies by seat count and firm type [40]. Market evidence from procurement platforms places common configurations at $15,000–$30,000 per named seat annually, with enterprise contracts reaching $50,000–$124,000 or more [41][64].

Buyer assessment. For a team that used Cyndx's Raiser to identify likely investors or acquirers, or relied on its transaction data for comparables, PitchBook is the most direct — and most expensive — upgrade. It is over-specified for pure top-of-funnel discovery of non-sponsored companies, its named-seat model penalises broad corporate rollout, and its AI remains summarisation rather than autonomous research. Many corp dev teams will find the right answer is PitchBook for one or two power users paired with a lower-cost discovery and workflow layer for the rest of the team.

Grata (Datasite)

Positioning. Grata is the strongest like-for-like replacement for Cyndx Finder in the specific job of finding obscure, founder-owned, bootstrapped and non-sponsored private companies from a plain-language thesis. It built its dataset by indexing company websites and inferring business descriptions, which is why it surfaces lower-middle-market businesses that never appear in venture or transaction databases [45][52]. Datasite acquired Grata on 3 June 2025, announcing a $500 million investment commitment; Grata now operates as a strategic business unit within Datasite, and Sourcescrub (acquired August 2025) and Valu8 (acquired May 2026) are being folded into it [42][43][47].

Coverage. Grata-only figures cite approximately 20–21 million private companies; 2026 commentary describes a combined Grata–Sourcescrub index of around 36 million, and Valu8 adds coverage described as 70 million European companies [45][46][47]. Buyers should ask precisely which universe their licence covers, as these are three different datasets in the process of integration.

AI. Grata launched Agentic Search in late 2025 — a capability that reasons through a request for market exploration, research, target identification and early diligence rather than translating it into filters — alongside its established natural-language and similarity search [50][51][102]. This is the most advanced discovery AI among the data-first vendors and the closest analogue to what Cyndx's Cyndy assistant was attempting.

Pricing and reviews. No public price list. Reported contracts range from roughly $15,000 to $100,000 per year depending on seats, exports, API and CRM integration, with small teams commonly in the low five figures; adding users can trigger true-ups [45][52]. Grata holds 4.8/5 on G2 from 79 reviews and 4.3/5 on Capterra from 9; users praise search usability, discovery and support, and criticise data inaccuracies requiring manual verification, limited contact depth and opaque pricing [45][60][63]. Grata's pricing page confirms that quotes are bespoke [39]; CorpDev.Ai's own competitive comparison cites a similar $10,000–$100,000 range and should be read as a competitor's estimate [38].

Buyer assessment. Grata wins on discovery quality for lower-middle-market targets and on user experience. Its weaknesses are the ones Cyndx shared — quote-based pricing, contact data that needs a second provider, and financials insufficient for underwriting — plus a new one: integration risk as three acquired products become one under a data-room parent. Existing Grata customers should secure roadmap, export and entitlement commitments in writing at renewal.

Sourcescrub (Datasite)

Positioning. Sourcescrub is no longer best evaluated as an independent alternative. Francisco Partners made a growth investment in September 2021 and sold the company to Datasite on 8 August 2025, with Datasite stating that Sourcescrub's data and capabilities would be integrated into Grata [43][44][58][79]. Its distinctive assets — conference and trade-show attendee intelligence, more than 220,000 monitored information sources, an "expert-in-the-loop" data-operations team of over 600, and mature CRM connectors ("Fuel Your CRM", Data Connect) — are what Grata is absorbing [48][49][53].

Coverage and pricing. G2 lists approximately 16 million companies; Francisco Partners described more than 160 million private-company data points [48][49]. Reported contracts ran $20,000–$60,000 annually across tiers historically named Discovery Essentials, Sourcing Plus and Winning Professional [53][54]. Reviews: 4.5/5 on G2 from 56 reviews and about 4.8/5 on Capterra from 20, with praise for conference intelligence, research and CRM integration, and criticism of stale records and entity-resolution problems [48][53][61][62].

Buyer assessment. For PE origination teams that source through industry events and need every target routed into DealCloud or Salesforce, Sourcescrub's capabilities remain highly relevant — but they should now be procured through the Datasite/Grata roadmap, with explicit confirmation of which event-intelligence, research-service and export features are already live in the combined product. New standalone Sourcescrub contracts carry the same transition uncertainty that Cyndx customers have just experienced from the other direction.

S&P Capital IQ Pro

Positioning. Capital IQ Pro is the broadest platform in this comparison and the natural choice when corporate development sits inside a finance organisation that also needs public-company financials, consensus estimates, credit data and Excel-based valuation. It is less a Cyndx replacement than the system Cyndx users were often supplementing.

Coverage. S&P cites more than 60 million private companies, of which 16 million-plus carry recent financials; 109,000-plus public companies; 1.2 million-plus M&A transactions; 907,000-plus funding rounds; 110,000-plus PE/VC funds; ownership data across 35,000-plus institutions; and more than 200 million estimates data points from over 200 brokers via S&P and Visible Alpha [69]. The headline private-company count exceeds Cyndx's, but only about a quarter of those records have current financials — the relevant test for any specific target is whether its revenue, ownership and financing data are actually populated.

AI. ChatIQ answers natural-language questions across the platform with answers linked to source material; Document Intelligence searches, extracts, annotates and compares filings and documents with Excel export; Chart Explainer interprets visuals; and a March 2026 release added ProntoNLP sentiment analytics and announced a planned Drift AI integration for natural-language Excel modelling [69][76][77]. The source-linked design is the strongest audit trail among the incumbents. Buyers should distinguish generally available features from roadmap announcements.

Pricing. Quote-based. Market estimates place per-seat cost at $15,000–$30,000 annually; observed small-team contracts include approximately $55,000 for five users and $75,000 for four, and total contracts for small teams are commonly quoted at $55,000–$125,000 or more depending on modules [65][66].

Buyer assessment. Choose Capital IQ Pro when board-grade valuation, public-target analysis, acquisition-financing and capital-structure work, or filing and transcript research dominate the workload. Do not choose it as the primary tool for thesis-driven discovery of small private companies; its search paradigm is structured screening, and the private-company breadth is uneven. The May 2026 S&P case study describes a hyperscaler's use of Capital IQ Pro's integrated AI features; it supports S&P's own workflow case, not adoption or endorsement of CorpDev.Ai [36].

Other Notable Options (Inven, Crunchbase, Tracxn, Dealroom, DealCloud, Midaxo, 4Degrees, Affinity)

The remaining vendors each replace one slice of what Cyndx offered. They are grouped by the job they perform.

AI-native discovery: Inven. The most direct challenger to Grata for lower-middle-market sourcing. Inven reports 28 million-plus companies, 100 million-plus legal entities mapped to group level and 430 million-plus professional and owner contacts, with natural-language search, AI-ranked target lists, ownership-structure analysis, intent-to-sell indicators and automated one-pagers and market maps [80][81][83]. Pricing is custom-quoted by team size, with CRM and contact data bundled rather than sold as add-ons [82]. Inven raised a $12.75 million Series A in May 2025 led by Ventech and Vendep Capital [101] — comparable in scale to Cyndx's total funding, so continuity diligence applies.

Startup and ecosystem data: Crunchbase Pro, Tracxn, Dealroom. All three are venture-oriented and materially cheaper than the institutional terminals. Crunchbase Pro is $99 per month with first-year annual discounts and AI-generated summaries — the clear budget option for basic discovery and alerts, but not a private-company M&A database [88]. Tracxn offers a free Lite tier and volume-based paid plans (market estimates of $300–$550 per month for Premium) with strong sector taxonomy [84][85]. Dealroom publishes $14,500 per year for core data and exports and $20,000 including business-email credits, tracks 250,000 investors, and is strongest for European ecosystems [86][87]. None replaces Cyndx's semantic discovery of non-venture companies.

Enterprise deal-process platforms: DealCloud, Midaxo. These are systems of record, not discovery tools. Intapp DealCloud offers configurable pipeline, relationship intelligence and Intapp Assist for Word and Outlook; deployments are quoted in the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars annually, with one market estimate citing an $85,000 entry point and roughly $505,000 average [89][90][106]. Midaxo connects sourcing, pipeline, diligence, integration and value tracking with a cited AI layer; third-party pricing shows a $10,000 starting point and buyer-reported spend around $50,000–$63,000 [91][92][93][94]. Either pairs with — rather than replaces — a discovery platform.

Relationship CRM: Affinity, 4Degrees. Both turn email and calendar activity into relationship intelligence. Affinity publishes $2,000, $2,300 and $2,700 per user per year across its Essential, Scale and Advanced tiers and enriches from 40-plus sources including PitchBook, Dealroom and Crunchbase [99][100]. 4Degrees is sales-led with market estimates of roughly $1,200–$1,800 per user per year for small funds and includes AI without separate credits [95][96][97][98]. They address the CRM gap Cyndx users complained about but do not replace a dedicated target-discovery engine; enrichment and sourcing functionality vary by product and tier.

Head-to-Head Comparison

The matrix below scores the principal candidates on the eight criteria. Scores are analyst judgements on a 1–5 scale derived from the evidence cited in the vendor profiles; they are intended to structure a pilot, not to substitute for one. Cyndx is shown for reference only.

Basis: coverage from vendor-published counts [9][28][45][67][69][80]; discovery from product documentation and review evidence [23][30][50][60][75]; workflow from published feature lists [28][75][76][81]; integrations from documentation [33][53][99]; AI from disclosed capabilities [26][30][50][69][75]; pricing from published cards and market estimates [28][41][52][65]; security from vendor statements (SOC 2, SSO) and parent-company scale [28]; continuity from ownership and funding [1][4][42][101].

Coverage and Data Model

Published Pricing Snapshot

Basis: published cards for Crunchbase, Affinity, Dealroom and CorpDev.Ai [28][87][88][100]; all other figures are third-party market estimates for quote-based products and should be used for budgeting only [17][41][52][53][64][65][66][92][93][106]. PitchBook and Capital IQ Pro ranges assume three named seats at the reported $15,000–$30,000 per-seat midpoints; Capital IQ Pro high end reflects observed small-team contracts.

Total Cost of Ownership and Pricing Reality

Headline subscription prices understate the true cost of a sourcing stack in three ways that Cyndx buyers, in particular, tend to have learned the hard way.

Quote-based pricing hides the true-up. PitchBook, Capital IQ Pro, Grata, Sourcescrub, Inven, DealCloud and Midaxo all price by negotiation [40][52][53][82][89][93]. Grata users report that adding seats mid-term triggers contract adjustments [52]; PitchBook's named-seat model means a fourth analyst costs another $15,000–$30,000 [41][64]; enterprise deal platforms carry implementation fees that can equal the first-year licence [106]. The transparently priced tier — CorpDev.Ai, Affinity, Dealroom, Crunchbase — removes this variance but substitutes usage limits (CorpDev.Ai's 12,000–36,000 annual search credits) or thinner data (Crunchbase) that must be sized against real analyst throughput [28][88][100].

Overlap is the largest avoidable cost. Industry budgeting ranges put a lean one-to-three-person stack at $10,000–$50,000 per year, a mid-market four-to-ten-person function at $50,000–$200,000, and a large enterprise team at $200,000–$750,000 or more [104][106]. The gap between the bottom and top of each band is driven less by seat count than by duplicated databases whose output never reaches a CRM. A team that replaces Cyndx with both Grata and PitchBook, and keeps a Salesforce instance nobody updates, has tripled cost without improving pipeline quality.

Analyst hours are the real currency. McKinsey's finding that 40% of generative-AI users in M&A shortened deal cycles by 30–50% [107][108], and Deloitte's that 83% of corporate and PE leaders have invested at least $1 million in M&A technology [111], both point to the same conclusion: the return on a sourcing platform comes from hours saved per qualified target and per memo, not from company counts. A $36,000 tool that produces a first-draft investment memo in minutes can displace more cost than a $90,000 terminal that produces a data export.

Which Tool for Which Buyer

The right replacement depends on which of Cyndx's three jobs — data depth, AI discovery, or workflow — carried the value, and on the team's size and existing systems. The archetypes below cover the majority of Cyndx's stated customer segments [21].

Enterprise corporate development (10-plus users) deserves a separate note. At this scale the decision is architectural: an institutional terminal (PitchBook or Capital IQ Pro) for data, DealCloud or Midaxo as the process system of record, and an AI research layer that can be governed — SSO, audit logs, no-training commitments — deployed across the wider team. CorpDev.Ai's Enterprise tier and Grata's Datasite parentage both target this pattern; Gartner's warning that over 40% of agentic AI projects will be cancelled by 2027 argues for a governed pilot with measured outcomes before enterprise rollout [112][113].

Buying Checklist and Pilot Design

The single most valuable thing a buyer can do is refuse to decide on demos. Every vendor in this comparison will perform well on a curated demo dataset; the differences appear only on the buyer's own target universe. The following pilot design has been used effectively for data-terminal selections and applies directly to Cyndx replacement.

Pilot Design (Four to Six Weeks)

1. Assemble a 25–50 company truth set. Include companies the team has already qualified, companies it passed on, and at least ten that were hard to find. Mix sponsor-backed, founder-owned and public where relevant.
2. Run the identical thesis through each candidate. Use the same plain-language acquisition profile. Measure recall (how many truth-set companies each platform surfaces), precision (share of results an analyst would keep after five minutes' review), and duplicate rate.
3. Test data on the specific targets. For each truth-set company, check whether revenue, ownership, headcount, financing and last transaction are populated and dated. Count the fields, not the company.
4. Audit the AI. Ask each platform to produce a one-page profile and a screening memo for three targets. Score source citations, factual accuracy against what the team already knows, and handling of missing data.
5. Route results into the CRM. Confirm that shortlists, contacts and activity land in the system of record without manual re-entry; time it.
6. Measure analyst hours. Record time from thesis to reviewed shortlist and from shortlist to first memo. This is the number that justifies the budget.

Commercial and Governance Checklist

• All-in quote including seats, modules, exports, API, integrations, implementation, support and renewal escalator
• Per-seat or per-team pricing, and the cost and process of adding a user mid-term
• Usage limits (search credits, exports) sized against measured pilot throughput
• Data-export and work-product ownership rights on termination or vendor discontinuation
• Change-of-control and product-discontinuation protections in the contract
• Funding status, ownership, customer count and product roadmap in writing
• SOC 2 report, SSO, encryption, data-residency and no-model-training commitments
• Which features are generally available today versus announced roadmap
• Reference calls with two customers of similar size and sector
• Named integration support for Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace and for the incumbent CRM

Key Facts & Sources

The load-bearing figures in this document, with source and as-of date. Figures marked "estimate" are third-party market estimates for quote-based products, not vendor list prices.