If one promise of artificial intelligence is to minimize mind-numbing business tasks, look no further than the drudgery of doing research for mergers and acquisitions.
That’s the premise behind Wokelo, a Seattle-area startup co-founded by two former management consultants, Siddhant Masson and Saswat Nanda.
Wokelo uses AI to produce detailed, multi-page due-diligence reports in a matter of minutes — including an overview of the subject company, insights from news coverage, a funding summary, list of recent product launches, and industry landscape, backed up by extensive citations.
In addition to company reports, Wokelo creates sector reports (including market size, competition, key performance indicators, and risks); and competitive analysis (market maps, benchmarking, and other factors). It also offers a secure data room where users can upload files, and a Q&A chat function for directed research.
The idea is to reduce the grunt work of M&A due diligence, creating more time for high-level analysis and human expertise. Wokelo CEO Masson and CTO Nanda experienced both ends of this spectrum in their prior roles.
“We went through the drills of creating those PowerPoint decks, doing the manual research, all the grunt work, the sleepless nights, adding logos on a bad day, but also some critical thinking for clients on a nice day,” Masson said.
The critical thinking, Nanda added, was “the fun part of the job.”
Funding: The company, founded in 2022, has raised $1.5 million in pre-seed funding from Untapped Capital, SeaChange Fund, Pack Ventures, Array Ventures, and Upsparks Capital, plus angel investors including leaders from investment banks, private equity firms, management consulting firms and Fortune 100 companies.
Wokelo, which employs eight people, is using the funding for continued product development, in addition to sales and marketing in pursuit of enterprise customers.
In a statement, Yohei Nakajima of Untapped Capital, creator of BabyAGI, described his own efforts to make an AI-powered diligence tool (among other in-house AI solutions for the investment process). That was before Untapped started to use Wokelo — which he said “has enhanced our due diligence process tenfold.”
Customers: Wokelo is initially targeting the technology to customers including venture capital and private equity firms, corporate development teams at large companies, and investment banks.
Early customers include the Guggenheim Partners investment bank, Seven Seven Six venture capital firm, Tata Group, Sage Collective private equity firm, and Snocap venture capital firm.
Competition and industry landscape: Other companies offering AI tools for due diligence include Ansaranda, which focuses on deal-room logistics; Thomson Reuters, through its Clear Adverse Media unit; and AlphaSense, which focuses on public markets and the curation of publicly available data.
In contrast, Masson said, Wokelo focuses on private markets, going beyond curation to generate insights from data.
Sources of information used by Wokelo to generate due diligence reports include:
- External sources like news articles, interviews, and other publicly available information on companies.
- Premium databases and sources, including FactSet, Cap IQ, and business/academic journals, accessed via commercial partnerships that Wokelo has established.
Technology: Wokelo does not have its own large language models, instead leveraging OpenAI’s GPT and open source models like LLaMA as the foundation of its technology stack.
However, Masson and Nanda said they have developed significant proprietary technology, including their own chunking algorithm, prompt management framework, observability platform, document generator, natural language processing (NLP) models, multi-layer deep learning models, and autonomous quality-assurance agents.
Availability: Wokelo is generally available but does not offer a self-serve freemium model. Instead, prospective customers need to first get a demo, followed what Masson describes as a “consultative selling process.” The company offers annual and semi-annual contracts with customized pricing tiers depending on the specific details of the implementation.
Trying it out: In the process of working on this story, I asked for temporary access to Wokelo to get a first-hand understanding of how it works.
As I test, I had the AI generate a due diligence report for Agility Robotics, a warehouse robotics company whose partnership with Amazon was a recent subject of my reporting. It surfaced several pieces of background that I hadn’t found in my manual research into Agility Robotics, illustrating the potential of the technology to not only match human capabilities but to go further.
Naturally, I also tried generating a due diligence report about Wokelo itself. Interestingly, it was not nearly as comprehensive, because the company has largely flown under the radar until speaking with me for this story.
Advisors: The company’s formal advisors are Tyler Dean (Confluence VC); Arvind Neelakantan (Open AI); and Dheeraj Harjai (Humana). (I learned about Wokelo from a mutual connection who introduced me to Omari Ross, an entrepreneur and startup investor who works with the Wokelo in a consulting capacity.)
Backstory: Masson and Nanda have been friends and colleagues for almost a decade. They first met after graduating from business school in India, when they both joined the consulting firm Monitor Deloitte.
For the next several years, they worked as strategy consultants, gaining experience with clients in various industries. Parts of the work were intellectually stimulating, they said, but they often found themselves bogged down in drudgery.
They both independently made the jump to corporate strategy roles at Tata Group, with Masson focusing on the e-commerce sector, and Nanda concentrating on areas including electric vehicles and 5G wireless technologies.
Later, Masson left to pursue his master’s of science in analytics at the University of Washington in Seattle. It was there that he was exposed to natural language processing and early incarnations of generative AI. In the meantime, Nanda went to work for Tata AIG, the insurance giant, where he was also immersed in NLP.
With that shared backdrop, they started working on an AI product of their own.
“We started tinkering around with it,” Masson said. Soon, he said, they realized that AI had progressed to the point where it “could really remove a lot of the grunt work that we used to do as management consultants back in the day.”
