The data room dies at close. The risk does not.
Datasite is the gold standard for hosting the diligence room — secure, audited, deal-ready. But the room is a transactional artifact. Once the deal closes, the link between the diligence intelligence and the live position is gone. Capital Refinery is what carries it forward.
What Datasite does well, and where the line is.
What Datasite is built for
Hosting, securing, and auditing the diligence data room.
Granular permissions, watermarking, audit trail, Q&A workflow, and bidder management. Datasite is the trusted infrastructure for the diligence window — used on a substantial fraction of every M&A and sponsor process globally. Inside the diligence window, it is excellent.
What it is not built for
Carrying the diligence intelligence forward after close.
Datasite hosts documents. It does not extract them into a structured investment record. It does not bind the thesis to the conditions that justify it. It does not test the entry assumptions against operator data flowing in three years later. The room exists; the connection to the live position does not.
Where Capital Refinery sits next to it
On the other side of close — with the structured record the room never produced.
Datasite ends when the deal closes. Capital Refinery starts when the IC approves. The diligence pack is parsed into a decisionable investment record, the thesis is bound, and the position is governed continuously across its life.
Where the lines fall.
| Capability | Datasite | Capital Refinery |
|---|---|---|
| Secure document hosting + Q&A | Strong — core capability | No — not the goal |
| Granular permissions + audit trail | Strong | Yes, but for the investment record |
| Deterministic-first extraction to structured record | No | Yes — three-pass kernel |
| Live link between diligence and operator data | No — disappears at close | Yes — the data model |
| Decision validity scoring | No | Yes |
| Time-to-consequence ranking | No | Yes — across the book |
The research behind this.
See it on a deal you closed.
The fastest way to feel the gap is to bring us a position that came out of a Datasite room. We will parse the same diligence pack into a structured investment record and walk back the decision validity together.