Every CIM Read in Full Before Anyone Can Decline

A middle-market private equity firm with twelve investment professionals receives roughly 200 confidential information memoranda a year, and every one has to be read before anyone can say no. The firm was not short of tools. It was short of a place to run them.

• 1,200 analyst hours, thirty working weeks. At six hours a document across 200 documents, all of it burned on preliminary screening before due diligence starts on a single deal.
• The cost is what the hours are made of. The firm pays for judgment and spends a third of it on gathering and formatting. Across the median PE firm, 35% of deal-team capacity goes to memo assembly rather than analysis.
• The associate spreading a CIM on Thursday. Is the same person who was supposed to be forming a view on the sector.
• It narrows the funnel. When a preliminary memo takes most of a working day, the team screens the deals it can get to rather than the deals it should see. Bankers run tight processes, and a firm needing three days arrives late to the ones worth winning.
• Every serious tool wanted the CIM in a vendor cloud. A CIM is the most confidential document a banker sends, covered by an NDA the firm signed, and what the firm is looking at is itself information it does not want leaving the building.

CreateOS built and deployed a crew of specialized agents that take an inbound CIM from "received" to a sourced, structured preliminary memo in the firm's own template, with every number traceable to the page it came from.

• The working corpus assembles itself. From the CIM, the data room, market data, filings, news, and the firm's own internal notes on the sector and the sponsor.
• Financials spread, comparables built, scenarios run. With the generated analytical code executed inside a contained environment rather than on an analyst's laptop.
• The first draft arrives in the firm's own format. Structured the way the investment committee reads, so the associate opens a memo instead of a blank page.
• Nothing enters the memo unsupported. Every claim, number, and assertion is grounded in a traceable source, so a figure carries the page it came from.
• MNPI is screened inline, on corpus and draft. Against the firm's own information-barrier policies, with anything that should not be there flagged.
• A research environment forks per deal. So a Friday batch of six CIMs processes in parallel rather than stacking in one associate's inbox. Work waiting on a data refresh pauses instead of burning compute.
• The firm's intentions cannot leak outward. Control plane and storage run inside the firm's own infrastructure, and egress is allowlisted in the kernel so gathering agents reach approved data providers and nothing else. The path does not exist. Each deal workstream is walled in its own guest kernel.

CreateOS is SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certified. Most agent builders own the prompts and rent the runtime. We own both, which is the only configuration that lets a firm point agents at the documents that actually matter.

The associate now opens a drafted, sourced memo on Monday morning instead of building one on Thursday.

• Roughly 1,100 to 1,300 analyst hours returned a year. Compressing the memo to under ninety minutes and reclaiming the conservative 60% to 70% of assembly capacity returns 720 to 840 hours directly, with the surviving full memos and diligence reviews contributing several hundred more.
• $165,000 to $195,000 of capacity, screening alone. At a fully-loaded $300,000 analyst cost, on a twelve-person firm, scaling linearly with deal flow and headcount. The contract is written against the firm's own measured baseline.
• A capacity story, not a cost cut. The firm did not remove an associate, it stopped spending one on spreading CIMs. The constraint on deals screened moved from analyst hours back to deal flow, which is where a PE firm wants it.
• Return enhancement is context, not a promise. Firms adopting generative AI in the investment function are associated with 3% to 5% higher annualized returns. That is an association across adopters, not a causal claim about a memo tool, and we do not price against it.
• The investment decision stays human. The agents gather, extract, model, and draft. The analyst interprets, challenges, and forms the view. What changes is that the thinking is the first thing they do that day rather than the last.

Weeks 1 to 2, baseline. Measure the firm's actual memo production time, the share of deal-team capacity spent on assembly, and current screening coverage. This becomes the contract's yardstick and protects both sides.

Weeks 2 to 6, build and integrate. Stand up the agent crew, integrate to the firm's data providers, document store, data rooms, and internal research along allowlisted paths, encode the information-barrier policies, deploy self-hosted inside the firm's boundary, scoped to one coverage area.

Weeks 6 to 9, augmented run. Associates produce memos with the agents alongside their normal process. Compare draft quality and time against the firm's own output, confirm every claim is grounded and the MNPI controls hold, tune.

Week 9 onward, controlled rollout. Expand across coverage areas and strategies as the grounding record builds, with the analyst owning the judgment throughout.

Success criteria, agreed up front: memo production time down at least 50%, assembly capacity materially reclaimed, 100% of claims grounded and traceable, zero MNPI or data-leakage incidents, 100% source-and-step audit coverage.