Private equity is a long game. A fund's returns depend not just on the quality of the business being acquired, but on the people running it. A founder with undisclosed litigation history, a C-suite executive with a pattern of adverse media, a key person whose public conduct creates reputational exposure for the portfolio, these are not edge cases. They are risks that surface regularly in due diligence when someone actually looks, and almost never when they don't.
The problem is that traditional due diligence processes were not built for the pace at which private equity operates. A week-long turnaround on a background report makes sense when you have months to close. It creates real friction when you are moving quickly on a competitive deal and every day of delay has a cost. And at the price point most EDD providers charge, thorough screening on every founder, every key executive, and every significant counterparty across a deal cycle adds up fast, directly eating into the returns the fund exists to generate.
Clarytas was built to solve both problems for PE firms.

Pre-investment screening

The highest-stakes moment for due diligence in private equity is before the investment is made. Once capital is deployed, the options for managing people risk narrow considerably. Before close, you still have full optionality.
Clarytas runs comprehensive background research on founders, C-suite executives, and key personnel as part of pre-investment diligence. This includes corporate affiliation history, litigation records, adverse media across multiple languages and jurisdictions, social media activity, sanctions exposure, and ownership structures that may not be immediately visible through surface-level searches. The goal is to surface anything material before it becomes your problem as an investor.
Reports are generated in approximately ten minutes, which means screening does not become a bottleneck in a fast-moving deal process. You get the depth of research that protects the investment without the turnaround time that slows it down.
LP onboarding and fund compliance
Regulatory obligations around LP onboarding have grown significantly more demanding in recent years. Funds are expected to conduct meaningful KYC and enhanced due diligence on their investors, not just collect documentation. For fund administrators and compliance teams managing LP onboarding at scale, that requirement creates a volume problem that manual research cannot efficiently solve.
Clarytas handles LP screening at the speed and consistency that fund onboarding requires. The same research depth applied to portfolio company management teams applies equally to LP background checks, sanctions screening, adverse media, corporate history, litigation exposure, delivered quickly enough to keep onboarding timelines intact.
Ongoing portfolio monitoring
The risk profile of a portfolio company does not freeze at the moment of investment. Litigation gets filed. Executives make headlines. Regulatory issues emerge. A founder whose background was clean at close may look different eighteen months later.
Clarytas supports ongoing monitoring across portfolio companies, flagging material developments in real time so that fund managers are not the last to know when something changes. Staying ahead of reputational and legal risk in an existing portfolio is significantly less costly than managing the fallout from something that should have been caught earlier.
What this means for returns
Due diligence is sometimes treated as a cost center, a compliance requirement to be managed as cheaply and quickly as possible. The better frame is risk-adjusted return. A single investment that goes wrong because of something a proper background check would have surfaced costs far more than any amount spent on EDD across an entire portfolio.
Clarytas makes thorough due diligence economically viable at every stage of the fund cycle — not just for the largest deals where the cost is easy to justify, but consistently, across every significant relationship where people risk exists.
If you are running a fund and your current process involves choosing between speed and thoroughness, we should talk.[Request a Demo]