How AI Is Replacing 100-Hour Due Diligence (Claude 4.6, Private Equity, and Emblem)

2026-02-13

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Private equity due diligence used to take hundreds of hours. Now it takes seconds.In Episode 31 of Built This Week, we sit down with August Kiles, Head of Product at Emblem, to break down how AI is transforming investment funds — from venture capital to growth equity to private equity.Emblem is building what they call the “last platform investors will ever need” — a system that ingests entire data rooms, extracts financials, compares deals, generates reports in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, and helps funds g...

Private equity due diligence used to take hundreds of hours. Now it takes seconds.

In Episode 31 of Built This Week, we sit down with August Kiles, Head of Product at Emblem, to break down how AI is transforming investment funds — from venture capital to growth equity to private equity.

Emblem is building what they call the “last platform investors will ever need” — a system that ingests entire data rooms, extracts financials, compares deals, generates reports in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, and helps funds get to a “no” faster.

We also demo a portfolio scenario simulation tool inspired by Emblem — showing how macro events like regulatory pressure or liquidity surges could impact a 30-company portfolio.

Then we dive into the latest AI news:

Amazon engineers pushing for Claude Code over internal tools
Why Opus 4.6 is a step-function improvement for coding
How AI is changing software development workflows
Elon Musk’s XAI reorg and what it signals about model competition

The big takeaway:

AI is not eliminating analysts.
It’s increasing deal throughput and freeing them to focus on alpha.

If you work in VC, private equity, family offices, or growth equity — this episode is for you.

New episodes every Friday.

⏱ TIMESTAMPS

(0:00) Emblem’s mission: the last platform investors will ever need
(0:25) Welcome to Episode 31
(0:55) Meet August Kiles from Emblem
(1:28) Building a portfolio scenario simulation tool
(2:05) Modeling regulatory pressure across a 30-company fund
(3:00) Liquidity supernova scenario explained
(4:00) What Emblem actually does for investment funds
(5:00) AI-powered due diligence and data room indexing
(6:00) From 100 hours of analysis to seconds
(7:20) The old way vs the AI-powered way
(8:30) Will AI reduce analyst headcount?
(9:40) Getting to “no” faster in private equity
(10:30) Where Emblem shines: seed vs private equity
(12:00) Multi-agent model orchestration inside Emblem
(13:00) How new models improved financial modeling
(15:00) Amazon engineers pushing for Claude Code
(17:30) Step-function improvements in Opus 4.6
(19:00) Coding workflows transformed by new models
(21:30) Elon Musk’s XAI reorganization
(23:00) Why model quality now matters more than IDE
(25:00) Final thoughts and wrap-up