YueDiligence: A Data-Driven Due Diligence Self-Assessment Tool

Knife Capital is a venture capital firm focused on growth‑stage technology businesses. The firm invests in and actively supports scaling technology companies, with a strong emphasis on disciplined investment decision‑making and portfolio oversight.

The team’s hands‑on involvement across the investment lifecycle means due diligence and business evaluation are central to how Knife Capital operates.

Venture capital due diligence involves assessing large volumes of information under time pressure, often with limited standardisation. Business data is typically supplied in inconsistent formats, at varying levels of depth, and across multiple documents, making objective comparison difficult.

For Knife Capital, this lack of structure made it harder to quickly identify risks, surface meaningful signals, and compare opportunities across a growing deal pipeline. Important details were frequently scattered across pitch decks, spreadsheets, and follow‑up conversations, slowing down early investment decisions.

The challenge was to introduce structure and consistency into due diligence without oversimplifying complex businesses or forcing a rigid, generic checklist.

Key challenges included:

• Designing a structured evaluation framework that still allowed for nuance and context.
• Making complex assessment data easy to interpret and compare across multiple companies.
• Reducing the time VCs spend requesting, validating, and re‑formatting information.
• Creating a system that works equally well for single‑company deep dives and portfolio‑level views.

Realm worked closely with Knife Capital to translate their VC experience into a practical, scalable digital platform in the form of YueDiligence. Rather than starting with features, the work focused on defining the right questions, the right structure, and the right outputs to support better investment decisions.

At the core of the platform is a VC‑curated evaluation framework. Businesses complete a structured self‑assessment that covers critical areas such as financial health, operations, strategy, and softer signals like culture and decision‑making philosophy. This information is collected in a consistent format, enabling meaningful comparison without repeated clarification.

Realm designed and built a set of tools around this framework to surface insight quickly:

• Interactive checklists that guide businesses through the assessment process and ensure completeness.
• Analytical reporting with clear visualisations that highlight strengths, risks, gaps, and progress over time.
• Benchmarking and peer comparison views that allow VCs to evaluate companies against industry norms and portfolio peers.
• Customised dashboards that give investors a single view of portfolio performance, trends, and key metrics at a glance.

Throughout the build, usability was a primary concern. The interface needed to be accessible to VCs, founders, and advisors regardless of technical background, while still supporting more advanced analysis for experienced investment teams.