Vendor diligence, four digital marketplaces
Five weeks, 60 structured interviews, 1m+ data rows; the equity story rebuilt and presented to six PE houses; an 8-figure exit.
Read the case study↗︎For investors
Expert networks sell inputs: ten conversations and a transcript. Full commercial diligence sells six weeks and a hundred pages. Between them sits the decision you face this fortnight - is this deal worth the machine? That is a question Lion answers.
The First Read
The First Read is triage, not coverage. It answers three questions:
Which two or three assumptions actually carry this deal?
What is our read on each - fact, estimate or judgement, labelled as such?
What would falsify them - and what must the full diligence prove?
The inputs are senior primary conversations, an agentic research bench that compresses the desk work from weeks to hours, and one judgement accountable for the conclusion.
The Market Read
Where the returns are, which assets could be bought, and what a thesis would have to believe. The Market Read is the piece of work that turns a sector hunch into an origination programme - commissioned before a process exists, at the same fixed fee and fixed clock.
What this is not
We will say so when the full work is needed. If you take the deal forward, the Read hands your diligence provider - whoever it is - a sharper scope and the questions that matter. We are comfortable writing the questions someone else answers.
What we will not do is hedge. A Read that concludes "it depends" has failed, and we treat it that way.
The record
Five weeks, 60 structured interviews, 1m+ data rows; the equity story rebuilt and presented to six PE houses; an 8-figure exit.
Read the case study↗︎A one-shot licensing window and a growth story that did not survive rebuilding. We said no - a verdict, delivered in time to act on it.
Read the case study↗︎An operating record blurred by three hard years, rebuilt into a case investors backed. The company has since listed.
Read the case study↗︎Why this is possible now
A read of this scope with a real view in it was structurally impossible: too small to mobilise a leveraged team, too much judgement for an expert network to sell. What changed is the delivery system.
More on how the practice runs is at About.
Fixed fee, agreed in writing before we start · mutual NDA ready to sign · sensitivity-tiered data architecture, disclosed per engagement · models, evidence and tools handed over at the end