Private equity is at a turning point. The era of cheap debt and easy multiple expansion is over, and with roughly $1.3 trillion of buyout dry powder still waiting to be deployed, the pressure to put money to work, and to do it well, has rarely been higher. Holding periods have stretched to around seven years, up from five to six in the last cycle, so returns can no longer be borrowed from a rising market. They have to be manufactured, through sharper analysis and faster, better-informed decisions. Bain's 2026 Global Private Equity Report is blunt about it: the winning firms build systems, not slogans, and invest in AI across sourcing, diligence, and value creation.

Yet the deal-execution machine is still stuck in the data room grind. And the obvious shortcut, feeding confidential deal data into generic public AI models, trades that grind for a worse problem: an intellectual-property, compliance risk no European fund, and no European LP can accept, or worse, deal information leaking to a competitive fund.

Clarenza is built for the shift this sets off. It is an EU sovereign AI platform that turns raw data room documents into source-traced investment intelligence, cited KPIs, structured risk registers, and ready-to-edit IC memos, all inside zero-retention European infrastructure. Today we are opening our closed beta.

What 50 investment teams told us

Picture an analyst at 11 pm. They are rekeying numbers from a PDF into a model for one deal, while half-finished market research for another sits in a stack of browser tabs, a reference call still needs writing up, and a partner wants a one-pager by morning on a third deal the fund will probably pass on. The work is mechanical, the context-switching never stops, and the real thinking happens in whatever minutes are left. That scene showed up in almost every conversation we had.

Over the past six months, we have spoken with 50 investment teams across 15 countries in Europe with up to 20B in AUM. They span the full range of private capital: pure-play PE funds, early and late-stage venture capital, growth equity, and LBO and buyout funds. Different mandates, different cheque sizes, one shared complaint.

The pain runs across the whole team. The junior analyst does the extraction grunt work. The investment manager carries the screening and the memo. The partner wants conviction and a clean audit trail. The COO owns compliance and LP confidentiality. Each one loses time to the same broken process.

Screening wears the team down. Hundreds of deals arrive for every one that closes, and capacity runs out long before the deals do. A few themes came back again and again.

• Mechanical work eats the day. Pulling figures out of data rooms, fixing messy formats, and rekeying numbers swallow the hours that should go to judgment.
• Synthesis is the real bottleneck. The hard part is not getting data out. It is turning it into a clear, decision-ready memo, fast enough to keep up with deal flow.
• Trust depends on transparency. No one acts on a black box. Every figure has to trace back to its source.
• Shadow AI is everywhere. Teams already run confidential deal data through general tools that lack the controls their mandates demand.
• Deal decisions lacking the full picture: Too many deals are decided upon using gut feeling, without all of the information. Many teams have all of the information, but they are just not in a position to process it all for a higher conviction.

Clarenza is our answer to all five. It clears the mechanical load so the team gets its hours back, for sharper judgment, better deal sourcing, deeper diligence on the deals that matter, and stronger terms at the table. Your confidential deal data is processed only by local models on EU infrastructure, and never leaves for a US LLM or cloud provider.

Built around your fund's thesis

A wave of general AI tools now promises to read a data room and write you a memo. The hard part was never summarizing a document. It is carrying a fund's thesis, computing a model the same way every time, and standing behind every number in front of a committee.

That is the job Clarenza was built for, and only that job. Under the hood, it is more than 30 custom-built agents, each designed for a specific task in private equity and investment research, from extraction to red-team risk to memo drafting.

No two funds invest the same way, so Clarenza is fully configurable to your thesis. You set the criteria, the red lines, and the metrics that matter to your strategy, and the agents screen against them. The red-team agents are tuned to your own no-go rules, so each deal is tested against the things that would actually make you walk. As you correct and refine, the setup sharpens to match how your firm decides, and it fits the way your memos already flow, from a one-page screening note to a full Investment Committee memo.

Here is the part most tools skip. Clarenza runs a full screening on every deal, not only the ones that look promising. Most teams can afford a deep look at a handful of names, and the rest get a glance. That is how good deals get missed and how weak ones survive too long.

When every deal gets the same rigorous screen, your no is as well-evidenced as your yes. You get higher conviction on the deals you kill, and you get there faster.

What a human team could never do on every deal

Some checks are obvious once you see them and impossible to do by hand on every deal. No team has the hours to hyperlink every figure, cross-check every claim, and reformat every memo, least of all for the deals they reject. Clarenza does all of it, on every deal.

• Verified, not trusted blindly. Clarenza targets over 90% verified extraction accuracy, and every figure is spot-checkable against its source. The analyst stays the decision-maker.
• Source traceability on every number. A human writes "revenue grew 23%" and the committee has to trust it or re-derive it. Clarenza links each figure to its page and exact spot, automatically, even across a 12,000-page data room. This traceability tech is now the subject of a registered patent, enforced across every agent.
• Anomaly flagging before the IC. Clarenza catches a revenue figure that contradicts the cash flow, a margin that jumps without reason, numbers that do not reconcile between documents. It is a layer of quality assurance an analyst would otherwise chase by eye, under deadline.
• Decision-ready output. Memos, IC packs, and one-pagers export to Word or PowerPoint, styled to your own templates. No copy-paste, no rebuild.
• Market enrichment, your choice of engine. Connectors test management's claims against independent facts, such as market size, growth, and competitive position. Your confidential data stays on local models, but for public market context you can choose to connect frontier models when you want richer research, never for the deal's private data.

Behind all of it, the financial calculations run on fixed solvers rather than a language model, so the math is repeatable and never invented. A value calculator sits in your dashboard, netting out review time so you can see the efficiency gain on each deal, from time to first structured output to analyst hours saved.

Built as responsible AI

Clarenza is built to put analysts in a stronger position, not out of one. It takes the mechanical work off their plate so they can spend their time where AI still falls short: working a human expert network, reading a founder across the table, the off-script conversation that shifts a deal, the judgment calls a model cannot make. The machine does the grind. The human makes the call.

That only works if the AI is one you can trust, so we built Clarenza as responsible AI from day one.

• Explainable by default. Clarenza is a glass box, not a black box. It shows its full chain of reasoning, so you can see how it reached a number or a risk flag and check the logic, not just the output.
• Aligned with the EU AI Act. We designed Clarenza around the EU AI Act's standards for transparency and human oversight from the start, so adopting AI does not become a compliance problem later.
• Your memory stays yours. Every fund builds institutional memory inside a secure, tenant-isolated environment. That knowledge remains only yours. It never trains frontier models and never leaks into anyone else's product.
• Audit-ready for DORA. Clarenza produces audit-ready reporting that helps your fund meet its DORA obligations as it brings AI into the investment process.

The point is plain. Better tools, more human judgment, and a clear record of how every conclusion was reached.

Proven before launch, then tested with you

We did not want to launch on a promise, so we tested Clarenza hard before opening the doors.

To date, it has autonomously produced 500+ screening memos from 6,500+ documents and 100,000+ pages, extracting 5,000+ KPIs. We checked the quality in two ways. First, we back-tested it on real deals with known outcomes, and it reached the same conclusions and flagged the same risks as the human teams. Then we stress-tested it on a large synthetic corpus across many sectors, planting errors and anomalies on purpose, and it caught them instead of glossing over them. When the answer was already known, Clarenza got it right. When we hid problems, it found them.

Now we want to test it with you. The beta is hands-on co-implementation, not a self-serve trial, so you get a real partner for five weeks. Two connectors are live for the beta, so your deals flow in from where they already sit, and the wider ecosystem follows by launch.

Each partner runs Clarenza on three of their own archived deals with known outcomes, so the gap between Clarenza's output and the real memo is easy to measure against clear targets: a first structured output in under 30 minutes, over 90% verified accuracy, and a real cut in analyst hours.

Use one of our curated deal pipeline workflows, or we can start by mapping your workflow and configuring Clarenza to match it. From there, you review the extraction, watch it triage every deal against your thesis, and compare its source-traced memos against your own templates. In the final step, we put Clarenza's output next to your analyst's real memo on the same deals and measure the gap, so you can see exactly where it helps and what is left to close. Partners who continue become founding partners, with priority access at launch and a real voice in the roadmap.

What comes next

This beta is the last validation step before Clarenza's commercial launch later this year. Partner feedback feeds straight into our first full release. The roadmap includes:

• Workflow builder to customize your agent pipeline to the way you prefer to work.
• Virtual data room, built in, for easier file management, plus chat with your data room to build custom memo sections on demand.
• Collaborative memo features, so the whole committee can comment on and shape a memo before the meeting, not after.
• A connector ecosystem of 50+ integrations across seven categories, from cloud storage and CRMs to market data, data rooms, and ERP, with bring-your-own-key market data and secure OAuth.
• Higher extraction accuracy and broader deterministic calculations, so more of the math is exact rather than estimated.
• Importable financial templates and presentation formats, so output matches your house style from the first run.
• Value-creation intelligence, looking past the screen to where a deal could actually create value.

You also choose how Clarenza is deployed. It runs as a fully managed EU cloud today, with a single-tenant dedicated VPC as the most requested option, and a fully air-gapped on-premise build for the strictest mandates (requires a satisfactory hardware setup, owned by the customer and managed by Clarenza AI). You pick the architecture that matches your risk tolerance, not a one-size-fits-all compromise. Our SOC 2, ISO 27001, and ISO 42001 programs are in progress, so the compliance story keeps pace with the product.

Our north star does not change as we grow. Traceable provenance, EU sovereignty, and analysis an investor can defend in front of a committee. The goal is plain: turn weeks of screening into days, without ever asking you to trust a number you cannot check.

If your firm screens deals under European confidentiality rules and wants a hand in shaping the tool that respects them, this is the moment to step in. Slots are limited, so every partner gets real founder attention. Request a beta slot, and we will set up a short intro call.

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