Hurdle Advisory — AI workflows for private equity

Why this is different

Not another platform.

Every AI vendor calling your firm right now is selling a new system: another login, another rollout, another per-seat invoice. Hurdle was set up to work differently.

The pitch you keep hearing

"Move your workflow into our platform."

Your team learns a new interface, your data gets copied somewhere new, and someone has to own the rollout. If it doesn't stick, you're still paying for the contract.

How we work

"Keep your workflow. We build into it."

We sit with your team, find the work that eats their week, and automate it inside the tools they already use. Deals still land in the CRM and files stay where they've always been. Your team keeps working the way they work now, minus the busywork.

Adoption stops being a problem when nobody's day has to change.

How an engagement works

Start small, gate everything, earn trust.

Pick one workflow

Deal intake, NDA turnarounds, CIM screening: pick something that hurts every week. We map it with your team, edge cases included.

Build inside your stack

The automation lives in your CRM, mailbox, and file shares, under your own tenant and permissions. Your security team reviews everything before it runs.

Human approval on every write

The AI proposes and your analyst approves, straight from their inbox. Every action is recorded and any of them can be undone.

Ungate as trust is earned

Once a step has proven itself over live deal flow, you decide what runs on its own. The controls stay yours either way.

What we build

Built for the work your team actually does.

The deal-intake pipeline below runs against live deal flow today, with an approval and an audit trail on every write. Everything we take on gets built the same way: inside your systems, controls first.

Deal intake, end to end

A teaser lands in the deals inbox. Financials, sector, and banker details are extracted and checked against your pipeline. One approval later, the CRM record exists and the folders are filed.

email → CRMone approval

NDA review & redlining

Every NDA is scored against your negotiating playbook, and edits come back as real tracked changes in the counterparty's own Word document. Nothing goes out until you've approved each edit.

playbook scoringtracked changes

CIM screening one-pagers

A 90-page CIM becomes a screening one-pager in your firm's own Excel template. Anything the model wasn't sure about gets flagged for review rather than guessed at.

your templateflags uncertainty

CRM hygiene & entity resolution

"Bear Stearns" and "Bear, Stearns & Co. Inc." are the same firm, and a banker who got promoted is the same person. The system can tell an update from a duplicate, and it asks when it can't.

no duplicatesasks, never guesses

Meeting prep, notes, and summary

For every meeting — banker calls, expert network sessions, management presentations — thoughtful questions get generated beforehand, notes get taken during, and takeaways get circulated after.

pre-call questionsauto takeaways

A working memory for your firm

Your deals, people, firms, notes, and documents become one connected map your AI can draw on. When a company you passed on in 2022 comes back to market, the system remembers why.

institutional memorycontext graph

Governance

Controls an investor would ask for.

Hurdle comes from the investing side of the table, where the job included asking managers hard questions about process and controls. The automation we build has to survive those same questions.

Approval before action

Every write to your CRM or files waits for an authorized person to say yes. Approvals happen over email, so there's no new tool to check.

A full audit trail

Every change is recorded with before-and-after values, who approved it, and when. There's never a question of what the AI proposed and what a person authorized.

Everything is revertible

Approved something by mistake? Any change can be rolled back from its journal entry, and the rollback gets recorded too.

Escalates instead of guessing

When the system hits low confidence, an ambiguous match, or a document it can't read, it flags a person rather than pushing through a guess.

Permissions that default to no

New users can read but not approve until an admin turns them on. Spoofed or unauthorized replies get quarantined and reported.

Your tenant, your data

Everything runs inside your Microsoft and CRM environment. There's no Hurdle database holding your deal flow.

About

Founded by an investor, not a software vendor.

Hurdle was started by Jonathan after 10+ years in private equity, across three different middle market and lower middle market buyout firms. It exists because most AI pitches reaching PE firms come from people who have never sat through a Monday pipeline meeting.

That background shows up in the work. We've read teasers where the EBITDA adjustment hides in a footnote, watched a CRM decay one rushed Friday at a time, and lost deal-days to NDAs stalled over nothing. We also learned which corners can't be cut. You won't spend the first month explaining your world to us.

The other half is full-time depth in what current AI does reliably and what it doesn't do yet. We'll tell you which is which. We'd rather build one workflow your team trusts than sell ten they won't use.

Get started

Start with one workflow.

The first conversation is a working session, not a sales call. Bring the process that annoys your team most and we'll walk through whether it can be automated, what the guardrails should look like, and whether we're the right fit to build it.

Book a working session

or write to jlo@hurdleadvisory.com