Capsa AI, a London-based startup aiming to transform the private equity due diligence process, has raised £1.7 million in a seed funding round. Led by Outward VC, the round also saw investment from Cornerstone VC and existing investor early-stage investor Antler who were also joined by angel investors including Chris Adelsbach (prominent figure in the European venture capital and fintech ecosystem) and others from private equity. Capsa AI will be using the investment to build its team and continue developing their proprietary AI.
TFN sat down with co-founder Danyal Özdüzenciler to discuss the future plans he and his fellow co-founder, Callum Downie, have in store.
An experienced team and a rapid rise
The diverse founders — Özdüzenciler and Downie met in an Antler residency and have, in just eight months, taken Capsa AI from founding to closing their seed funding round, a rapid progression made possible by their backgrounds.
Özdüzenciler brought over six years of private equity experience. “I saw first hand how much time investors wasted on low-skill due diligence tasks,” he said. His frustration motivated him to the Antler residency in the hope of building a better solution. It was there he met Downie. “Callum, with experience in AI and ML across defence and retail, didn’t initially expect to work in finance,” Özdüzenciler told us. “However, he recognised the transformative potential of new AI models to handle limited, confidential, and complex data.”
Working on the idea of Capsa, they quickly discovered that Özdüzenciler’s experience was typical. “We interviewed over 100 private equity professionals,” he recalled, “it was clear there was a significant problem to solve. Currently, PE teams spend 25% of their time on repetitive due diligence tasks, costing on average £50k annually per professional and affecting all levels from analysts to partners.”
Supporting more than $30 billion in investment
The result has been well-received, already generating revenue, Capsa AI is being used in funds that manage over $30 billion in firms across the UK, US, and Germany. Antler partner Jed Rose commented, “Danyal and Callum are a world-class founding team, combining direct industry experience with machine learning expertise. They have executed quickly and built a product which is already having an impact on private equity.”
The platform takes care of the essential, but often mundane, elements of due diligence, says Özdüzenciler. “Capsa AI helps investors quickly aggregate both public and private company data into one place, and use AI-powered tools to analyse it.” He continued, “it takes all the unstructured data that a private equity investor typically works with and automates tasks like generating company profiles, summarising financial performance, answering due diligence queries, and reviewing legal contracts.”
Capsa AI has been well received by their early customers. As well as reporting significant time savings as a result of its automation, they are also reporting a more than healthy 90% satisfaction score for the product. Capsa AI say the product’s careful implementation of PE-specific workflows and requirements have been helping to set it apart from other tools.
Becoming the leader in private investment AI
Capsa AI plans for the investment include building their team, especially with engineering talent, and developing their product further. They will also be using their funding to deepen their target market penetration.
Their rapid growth leaves them confident about Capsa AI’s future. Outward VC Principal Sanchit Dhote commented, “The Capsa AI team has developed a groundbreaking solution that is fundamentally reshaping how private equity firms approach due diligence.” And he thinks that role will only become more important. “With private markets experiencing tremendous growth over the past decade, the volume, and complexity of data for due diligence has grown exponentially.”
Özdüzenciler believes that their importance to the private equity sector will only grow. “Having proven the impact of AI in due diligence, Capsa is now integrating additional data sources and developing new applications to streamline the process even further,” he said. “Based on customer feedback, Capsa expects to save investors up to 15 hours a week over the next six months, allowing them to focus on evaluating more deals, diving deeper into promising opportunities, and supporting portfolio companies.”
He also believes that, as Capsa AI develops further, it can move beyond its due diligence roots. “In the longer term, Capsa has the potential to support PE investors beyond due diligence, across the entire deal lifecycle—from deal sourcing and transaction closing to portfolio management,” he said. “Additionally, we see opportunities to expand into adjacent markets with significant overlap in use cases, such as family offices and growth equity firms.”
If it comes to fruition, it would see Capsa AI powering a significant portion of the world’s investment, but that’s part of their plan. “Ultimately,” says Özdüzenciler, “our ambition is to become the global leader in AI for private investments.”
