Portfolio News
Sorenson Capital invests in Keye, an AI-driven platform transforming how private equity firms conduct due diligence.
Private market investing firms are experiencing serious growing pains.
As technologies evolve, economies shift, and capital allocators strain to keep up, the private equity space has become more resource-intensive. Sourcing quality deals is more competitive than ever, and deal teams are struggling to qualify investments quickly.
Associates are spread too thin. Today, the pre-deal research phase, from sourcing to term sheet, can take anywhere from two to six months and cost millions. The industry is projected to spend $80 billion on due diligence over the next five years alone.
As pre-investment diligence processes grow more complex, even as timelines shrink, it’s becoming more difficult to focus efforts on the right opportunities and easier to miss critical details before term sheets are signed. Far too often, deal teams are discovering key issues about assets too late in their process. In fact, more than 80% of private equity leaders believe the typical diligence approach is falling short.
That’s why Sorenson Capital is proud to announce its investment in Keye. Built by former investors, Keye is the first AI-native platform designed specifically for private equity due diligence. The platform ingests financial data and spreadsheets, structures and analyzes them with institutional-grade accuracy, and delivers audit-ready outputs in minutes. It mirrors how elite deal teams operate, without requiring the hours of manual work.
“Keye’s founders have launched a completely novel product that addresses real pain points in the private equity space quickly, reliably, and effectively,” said Suril Butala, a Vice President at Sorenson Capital. “We are thrilled to back Keye and are confident in the value it will continue to deliver to its customers, including our own investment team.”
A New Standard for Diligence Efficiency and Accuracy
Keye transforms raw deal files into structured, investor-ready insights. Whether a team is evaluating ARR builds, retention bridges, cohort analyses, or price-volume effects, Keye enables that analysis to happen instantly and with complete traceability. Its outputs are Excel-ready, formula-linked, and fully attributed to source data, helping investors build conviction faster and with more confidence.
The platform allows investment teams to:
- Find and Compile Data: Scan VDR files and transform unstructured documents into usable tables instantly
- Catch Hidden Risks: Automatically flag deal-critical details that affect your investment case
- Perform Analysis: Run advanced analyses like cohort studies, margin bridges, and retention segmentation
- Export Excel Models: Export fully linked spreadsheets with editable formulas and source tagging
- Source Every Fact: Trace each insight back to its original document and verify the underlying math
- Understand Your Needs: Ask Keye to update analyses on the fly, just like you would direct an associate
- Benchmark Every Deal: Compare deal performance metrics across every transaction your firm has ever reviewed
Keye goes beyond basic AI summarization tools. It doesn’t just create memos or highlight keywords, it performs genuine quantitative analysis, eliminating human error, hard-coded cells, and hallucinations. The result is a platform that fits seamlessly into private equity workflows, enabling teams to move from CIM to term sheet with unprecedented speed.
From a financial analyst to an investor’s operating system
As any investor is well aware, it’s never just about one deal’s success, but rather about the firm’s strategy and performance overall. Keye aggregates all financial information about every deal you run through its system. This means the platform can evolve into a ‘deal database’ where firms can easily evaluate the financial profiles of all the deals they have evaluated. Over time, this can become invaluable for firms to benchmark new investments, measure the efficacy of their sourcing motions, and pressure test the valuations they are paying over time. This database not only enhances deal evaluation but also shapes firm identity, strategy, and long-term success.
Keye’s approach to summarizing financial data positions the company to automate countless workflows for private equity investors. For example, many investors use solutions like iLevel or Allvue to track their portfolios. By tracking fund-wide performance patterns, Keye will help firms institutionalize their investment intelligence. This long-term knowledge accumulation strengthens firm identity, sharpens competitive differentiation, and enhances decision-making for superior returns.
Ultimately, Keye has the opportunity to become the core operating system for a private equity firm’s due diligence, deal benchmarking, and back-office operations.
Built for Investors, by Investors
Keye’s founding team, Rohan Parikh, Lalit Lal, and Conor Brown, bring deep expertise from investment banking, private equity, and AI-driven startups. Their firsthand experience conducting diligence on hundreds of deals underscored the need for a tool that could go beyond surface-level insights and instead provide the structured, investor-centric analyses that drive successful investment outcomes.
With proprietary AI models trained on thousands of PE-specific deal documents, Keye’s platform is designed to think and operate like an investor, prioritizing relevant facts, eliminating noise, and delivering only the most meaningful insights.
With this $5 million seed funding round, Keye is poised to expand its capabilities beyond due diligence and into portfolio monitoring and benchmarking.
Sorenson Capital’s Perspective
At Sorenson Capital, we have long been focused on automating tedious, manual workflows so our investment team can focus on the strategic questions that matter most. After evaluating many solutions, Keye stood out for its ability to ingest a full VDR and generate actionable, editable, and reliable financial outputs without custom configuration.
“As a customer of Keye, we at Sorenson fundamentally evolved how deals progress through our pipeline,” said Suril Butala, Vice President at Sorenson Capital. “We can move from the first meeting to extending a term sheet much faster, with better data and more confidence. We can’t see ourselves going a day without it anymore.”
The Future of Private Equity is Faster, Smarter, and More Repeatable
In a market where diligence can define outcomes, Keye gives firms the ability to qualify more deals, spot risks earlier, and move quickly when conviction is high. We believe the firm is on its way to becoming the core operating system for private equity deal teams.
Keye is building the future of private equity, one where analysis is instant, institutional knowledge compounds over time, and every deal decision is backed by real math.
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