Pre-LOI OSINT, done in an afternoon.

What boutique M&A teams need

Big banks have entire diligence floors and outside firm relationships. Mid-market and boutique firms do not. You're the analyst running concurrent diligence on 3 targets in week one, and the time pressure is real. The OSINT signals that should kill or repriced a deal often surface late, after the buyer has emotional commitment to the transaction. Tracelight is built to surface those signals at the earliest possible date.

• Sanctions / PEP screening on principals and the target entity
• Undisclosed litigation against the target or its officers
• Beneficial-ownership chains (UBO + obvious nominees)
• Key-person reputation signals (prior bankruptcies, regulatory actions)
• Social-signal red flags that didn't surface in management interviews

Pre-LOI checklist

We provide a 12-item pre-LOI OSINT checklist tuned for boutique M&A: target entity sanctions, target litigation index, key-person sanctions, key-person litigation, key-person prior-position record, beneficial-ownership walk, regulatory action history, IP/trademark dispute index, employment-suit pattern check, social-platform red flags, news-archive mention sweep, and parallel-claim verification. Each item produces structured signals in the report.

What the report looks like

One target = one Tracelight case. The case bundles the target entity and its key principals as subjects. The deliverable is a single PDF with a citation appendix — every red-flag claim links to the public source. Use it as the basis for the IC memo and the outside-counsel referral. The content hash on the report is the same one we'd use to authenticate it in a dispute.

Integration with deal tooling

Tracelight has a public REST API for ingesting target lists, native integrations with Slack and Notion for IC distribution, and a Zapier connector if your CRM is mid-market (HubSpot, Pipedrive). For shops with custom Affinity or DealCloud setups, the API + webhooks are straightforward to wire — see /docs.

Honest about scope

Tracelight is not a substitute for QoE, outside legal review, or a forensic accounting engagement. We are the tool that runs the first OSINT pass, surfaces the issues, and points the outside firms at the right rocks. The economics: at ~$15-30K per outside-firm pre-LOI engagement, Tracelight pays for itself if it kills one bad deal a year before you've cut the first check. Most of our M&A users are running 3-8 concurrent diligences and the time savings alone (5-8 hours per target on the OSINT pass) is the immediate justification.

Common objections

What we don't do

Honest positioning matters more than feature-list maximalism. Here's what we're explicitly not, so you can rule us in or out faster:

• We don't certify findings — Tracelight is the first pass, not a closing-memo substitute.
• We don't aggregate proprietary financial data (we surface from public sources).
• We don't replace QoE, outside legal review, or forensic accounting.

Related workflows

Other audiences