DiligenceSquared Brings AI Voice Agents to M&A

DiligenceSquared Is Replacing Consultants With AI Voice Agents

In the high-stakes world of mergers and acquisitions, due diligence research is everything. Before a deal closes, buyers need to understand the target company inside and out — and that means talking to customers, suppliers, and industry experts. Traditionally, this work has been handled by elite consulting firms charging six- and seven-figure fees. Now, a startup called DiligenceSquared is deploying AI voice agents to do the same job at a fraction of the cost.

Founded by former M&A advisors and AI engineers, DiligenceSquared launched publicly on March 5, 2026, with backing from prominent venture capital firms. The company's pitch is simple but disruptive: let AI conduct the hundreds of customer and stakeholder interviews that due diligence demands, then synthesize the findings into actionable intelligence for deal teams.

How AI Voice Agents Conduct Due Diligence Interviews

DiligenceSquared's platform works by deploying conversational AI voice agents that can place phone calls to a target company's customers, vendors, and partners. These agents are trained on industry-specific interview frameworks and can adapt their questions in real time based on the respondent's answers.

• Automated outreach: The platform ingests a list of contacts and schedules calls autonomously, handling time zones, voicemails, and follow-ups without human intervention.
• Natural conversation: The voice agents use advanced large language models to hold fluid, context-aware conversations that feel natural to the person on the other end of the line.
• Structured data extraction: Every call is transcribed, analyzed, and mapped to key diligence themes such as customer satisfaction, churn risk, competitive positioning, and Net Promoter Score.
• Synthesized reporting: After completing a batch of interviews, the platform generates comprehensive reports with sentiment analysis, trend identification, and risk flags.

The result is a process that used to take consulting teams four to six weeks compressed into days. DiligenceSquared claims its agents can complete over 200 interviews in a single week — a volume that would require a small army of human researchers.

A Massive Market Ripe for Disruption

The global M&A advisory market generates billions in revenue annually, and commercial due diligence is one of its most labor-intensive segments. Private equity firms, in particular, rely heavily on customer reference calls to validate investment theses before committing capital.

"We're not trying to eliminate human judgment from the deal process. We're removing the bottleneck that prevents deal teams from talking to enough people to make truly informed decisions." — DiligenceSquared CEO

The startup estimates that a typical commercial due diligence project costs between $150,000 and $500,000 when handled by a top-tier consulting firm. DiligenceSquared offers comparable scope starting at $15,000, representing a potential cost reduction of 90 percent or more.

The Broader AI Interview Revolution

DiligenceSquared's launch is part of a larger trend of AI-powered interview and conversation tools reshaping how businesses gather qualitative data. From user research to hiring to market validation, AI agents are increasingly handling tasks that once required trained human interviewers.

Tools like InterviewAlly have already demonstrated how AI can assist professionals in conducting more effective interviews, whether for recruitment, research, or strategic analysis. The convergence of voice AI, natural language understanding, and domain-specific training is opening up use cases that seemed impractical even a year ago.

What makes DiligenceSquared's approach notable is its focus on a particularly high-value, high-trust domain. M&A due diligence demands accuracy, nuance, and the ability to detect subtle signals in how respondents describe their experiences. The company says its models have been fine-tuned on thousands of real due diligence interviews to handle these complexities.

What Comes Next

DiligenceSquared plans to expand beyond M&A into adjacent areas such as competitive intelligence, vendor risk assessment, and investor due diligence. The company is also developing multilingual capabilities to support cross-border transactions, which account for a growing share of global deal activity.

For an industry built on relationships and trust, the introduction of AI voice agents raises important questions about disclosure, consent, and data privacy. DiligenceSquared says it always identifies its agents as AI at the start of each call and complies with recording consent laws across jurisdictions.

Whether traditional consulting firms view DiligenceSquared as a competitor or a complement remains to be seen. But one thing is clear: the economics of due diligence research are about to change dramatically.