Diligence misses the operating reality.
The IC memo lists what you bought. It doesn’t list the people who keep it running.
M&A integration intelligence
Value creation starts withknowing what not to break
Inside the Day 1-100 sprint
01
Deal record
Memo, model, contracts. The story the deal team already has.
What breaks
The danger is breaking what you bought.
After close, teams rush to merge systems, roles, reporting, and processes. Some should change. Some are the asset. Some hide synergies. The hard part is knowing which is which.
The fragile parts are unwritten.
The workaround that holds Q3 reporting together lives in someone’s head, not a doc.
Decisions happen in meetings and spreadsheets.
Cutting a TSA is a million-dollar call. It gets made with a slide deck and three opinions.
Two phases
Two phases. Earlier decisions, backed by evidence.
Before close, decide with evidence: proceed, renegotiate, or mitigate. After close, know what to preserve, integrate, or delay.
Not a dashboard. Not a tracker. Covalence does the analysis work and keeps the integration model tied to sources, owners, risks, and decisions. Run either phase, or both.
Phase A, Diligence to close
Readiness pack
Pressure-test the deal thesis before you own it.
Before close, the question is whether the deal thesis survives contact with operating reality. You have diligence reports, a deal thesis, an org chart, a synergy model, and early Day-1 assumptions.
Covalence builds the first integration baseline.
We reconstruct the target org and people map from your materials and professional sources: role backgrounds, likely key people, capability overlaps, critical workflows, dependency gaps, retention risks, and synergy assumptions that still need proof.
Where useful, we add expert calls with recently departed leaders to clarify how the business actually worked beyond the materials.
You get a source-linked readiness pack: deal breakers, unknowns, proposed integration posture, critical people, and verification actions.
You also get the question set your team takes into diligence meetings with the target's management and functional leads.
Phase B, Day 1-100
Operating map
SEE HOW THE COMPANY ACTUALLY RUNS.
After close, access opens up. The org chart says one thing. The people doing the work may say another. And the synergy model often assumes things no one has tested against operating reality.
Covalence starts from the scattered company data your team already has: diligence materials, trackers, org charts, operating data, and the team's own updates. It builds the map of how the company works and keeps reading as new material comes in.
Then Covalence runs structured interviews, conducted by AI, across the acquired company, up to every employee, with their consent. People confirm what the map gets right, correct what it gets wrong, and add what no document captured.
Where the documents name one owner and the people name another, you see both side by side, each tied to its source. The contradiction is the signal: what to preserve, integrate, or delay before a wrong assumption becomes expensive.
The same test runs against the deal thesis. Of the synergies you priced, Covalence shows which survive operating reality, which can move earlier, and which are at risk because they depend on specific people, workflows, or systems.
You get a source-linked operating map: real owners, hidden dependencies, what can break, synergies still worth chasing, and key people you cannot afford to lose.
As new evidence comes in, Covalence proposes plan updates: owners to change, sequencing to revise, risks to escalate, synergies to re-prioritize. Over time, the same learnings sharpen the playbook your next deal starts from.
Founder
Founder
Rémi Al Ajroudi
Built by an AI engineer, shaped with M&A operators.
Rémi Al Ajroudi builds model-based AI and evidence systems for high-stakes expert work.
TrainingÉcole Normale Supérieure Paris-Saclay · MVA
ResearchApple · University of Tokyo · Carnegie Mellon
Public mandateBelgian institutional audits
FocusEvidence-backed AI systems
He also served as an independent expert on Belgian institutional audits carried out under the country's public higher-education quality assurance system. The work used documents, interviews, evidence collection, and structured reports. It showed how much expert judgment depends on disciplined information work.
Domain guidance comes from Patrice Pinsard, former executive at Solvay, Cognis, and Perstorp, with post-acquisition integration experience across Europe, the US, Brazil, China, and India.
Trust model
Start confidentially.
Every claim on the map links back to its source: the document, the line, the interview. Your data stays scoped to the deal and never trains a model.
Redacted starts
Access agreed upfront
No model training on your data
Source-linked outputs
Human review in the loop
Post-acquisition integration
See what the documents missed.
Bring a deal you're working on and the materials you already have. We'll build the first map, then talk to the people who run the company day to day and show you where reality diverges from the documents.