Can AI screen a CIM or teaser?

What can an AI screen pull out of a CIM?

Anything the document states: the business, the numbers, the deal and what is missing.

A teaser is a short, anonymous document that opens a sale process; buyers who sign a confidentiality agreement then receive the CIM, a detailed company-specific memorandum that can run from 30 to over 150 pages. A first-pass screen of either can produce:

• A deal snapshot: what the company does, its customers, its ownership and the process timetable.
• The financials: revenue, EBITDA, margins and growth, with the page each figure came from.
• A criteria check: each fund criterion with the target's actual value, marked pass, fail or unclear.
• Inconsistencies: figures that differ between the summary, the tables and the appendix.
• Bull and bear cases, and the red flags behind the bear case.
• First-call questions, aimed at the gaps the document leaves.

Teasers are short, hide the company's name and may give ranges instead of exact figures, so expect more criteria marked unclear. The useful output there is whether to sign the agreement and ask for the CIM.

What can't an AI screen tell you?

Whether the seller's numbers and claims are true, and whether the business is one your fund should own.

A CIM is written by the seller's advisers to market the company. A screen can check the document against itself and against your criteria; it cannot check adjusted EBITDA against the books, confirm customer relationships or judge management. That is diligence work.

Reading accuracy is the other limit. In the FinanceBench study of November 2023, a leading model with document retrieval answered 81% of 150 questions about public company filings incorrectly or not at all; feeding the relevant pages straight into the model did better. Models have improved since, and CIMs differ from public filings, so the number that matters is how a screen performs on your own documents.

How do you set up a screen you can trust?

Write your criteria down, insist on unclear instead of guesses, and test the screen on deals you have already decided.

1. Make criteria testable. Revenue and EBITDA ranges, sectors, geography, ownership and valuation guardrails, each a threshold, not a feeling.
2. Require a source for every figure, with the page it came from, and unclear wherever the document is silent.
3. Back-test. Run the screen on a batch of past CIMs with known outcomes and compare its verdicts with your team's.
4. Study the misses, both the deals it would have wrongly passed and the ones it would have wrongly dropped.
5. Keep a person on every verdict. The screen recommends; a deal professional decides.
6. Check the agreement and the tool. Make sure the confidentiality agreement allows the processing, and that the tool keeps uploads private and does not train on them.

What does Forward Deployed's deal screen produce?

Ask for Deal Screening (CIMs and Teasers) in your AI assistant, add the CIM or teaser and your fund's criteria, and you get a one-to-two-page screening memo and a five-to-seven-slide partner discussion deck.

The memo gives one verdict, Pass, Further Diligence or Hard Pass, with the rationale, a deal snapshot, a criteria screen of target against actual, bull and bear cases, five to ten first-call questions, red flags and data inconsistencies. Each criterion is marked Pass, Fail or Unclear, and none passes without data. You can add up to 12 files.

The price is shown before it runs, and deliverables cost at most 300 credits, or $30, at today's prices. Files stay private to your engagement and are never used to train AI models (security). Other deal deliverables are on the services page, and how private equity firms use AI puts screening in the context of the whole deal cycle.

Frequently asked questions

Sources and further reading

Sources are linked so you can check them. Statements that vary by employer, or that accounts disagree about, are hedged in the text. Found a mistake? Email support@forwardeployed.work and we will correct the page and update its date.

1. Teaser. Glossary, Euronext Corporate Solutions.
2. Confidential Information Memorandum. Financial Edge, training resource.
3. Non-disclosure agreement. Encyclopedia entry.
4. FinanceBench: A New Benchmark for Financial Question Answering. Pranab Islam and others, preprint, November 2023.