A due diligence engages many disciplines on a data room of thousands of pages, usually on an auction timetable. Teams sample documents and public sources, and the result depends heavily on who did the reviewing. The people who rely on the work afterwards, an investment committee, a lender, an insurer of warranties and indemnities, increasingly ask the same question: where does each conclusion come from?
AnKre answers it by changing the unit of work. The unit is not the report or the chapter; it is the claim. Share capital, beneficial owners, litigation, licences, certifications, a director's past roles: each statement made in the data room or by management becomes a claim that can be checked against registries, regulatory filings and public sources.
Three statuses, no traffic lights
Every claim receives one of three statuses, each with its evidence, its source and its retrieval date:
- Supported: the available records back the claim.
- Unresolved: the records available do not settle it, in either direction.
- Contradicted: the records say something different from the claim.
There is deliberately no red, amber and green. A colour invites the reader to stop at the colour; a status with its evidence invites them to open the evidence. The evidence decides, not the colour.
Why unresolved matters most
The most dangerous line in a due diligence report is the one that says nothing was found. It can mean that the question was checked and the answer is clean, or that the sources needed to answer it were not available. Those are opposite situations, and a reader cannot tell them apart unless the report keeps them apart.
AnKre therefore treats Unresolved as a first-class outcome. Missing evidence is named, the limits of the investigation are recorded next to the findings, and an analysis that found no relevant passage is never displayed as a success. The same applies inside the interface: an unavailable source, a failed collection or a partial check never shows as a completed result.
Agents propose, an analyst decides
Specialist agents carry the groundwork: collecting, reading, resolving identities, mapping relationships and testing claims. What they produce reaches an analyst as a proposal, labelled as agent-produced. The analyst accepts, edits or rejects it, and that decision becomes part of the record. No finding is released without a named analyst's decision.
The result is a chain that can be walked back months later: claim, evidence, source, retrieval date, confidence and reviewer decision. Four deliverables carry it: an executive note, a detailed report, an evidence pack and an audit trail.
One core, several uses
Claims are not specific to M&A. A distributor's statements about its ownership, a professional's stated qualifications, a partner institution's accreditations or a contractor's affiliations before access to sensitive information are all claims. AnKre's core is a claim verification engine on a knowledge graph; M&A due diligence is its first use case, and the same statuses, evidence chain and review rule serve the others.