Q&A and the deal Knowledgebase

Diligence runs on questions. The Q&A system is where investors ask and the deal team answers; the Knowledgebase is how a deal team avoids answering the same question twice.

The Q&A loop

A question moves through a predictable arc:

1. Investor submits a question — a title, a description, and a category, optionally pointing at a specific file.
2. Deal team triages it — sets a priority and confirms the category, so urgent questions surface above routine ones.
3. Deal team drafts a response — optionally with AI assistance (see below), always with a human in the loop.
4. Response is posted to the investor, who can read it and follow up in the same thread.
5. Question is closed once resolved.
6. Thread is optionally promoted to the Knowledgebase, so the next investor with the same question finds the answer without asking.

A question's status is always open, answered, or closed. That status feeds the readiness signal described at the end of this page.

Where questions live

There are two Q&A surfaces. Both share the same underlying model — the same question, response, and knowledge-base records sit behind each.

Standalone Q&A is the data-room-level inbox: questions an investor raises about the deal generally. This is the cross-cutting "I have a question about this company" channel.

Transaction-scoped Q&A is questions threaded under a specific transaction, tied to one deal's lifecycle. When an investor participates in a structured deal, their questions about that deal live with the deal rather than in the general inbox.

For the investor this is largely seamless: they see their questions and answers, and the general-versus-deal-specific distinction is a matter of where they asked, not a separate product. For the deal team it matters more, because transaction-scoped Q&A completeness feeds that deal's readiness score.

AI-drafted responses

The deal team can request an AI-drafted response. The system reads the question alongside relevant data-room content and produces a draft — a starting point, not a sent message.

The AI draft is a suggestion, never an automatic answer. No draft reaches an investor without a human reviewing and explicitly publishing it. The draft is generated, the deal team reads and edits it, and only then is it posted. There is no path where an investor receives an AI-written answer that no human reviewed.

The audit trail records this. Every posted response carries a flag recording whether it originated as an AI draft. The flag exists so that, months later, anyone reconstructing what was represented to an investor and on what basis can see the provenance of each answer on the record. Treat the AI as a fast first draft over the data room's contents; the human edit-and-publish step is non-negotiable.

Categories and priority

Every question carries a category — financial, legal, technical, market, team, or other — and a priority — low, normal, high, or urgent. The category routes the question to the right reviewer; the priority decides what is answered first when the queue is deep. Set the category by who should answer, and the priority by how much the investor's next step depends on the answer.

The Knowledgebase

Answering a recurring question inline every time wastes effort and risks inconsistent answers. The Knowledgebase resolves this.

An answered or closed thread can be promoted into a Knowledgebase entry: a clean, standalone Q&A article synthesised from the conversation. The entry starts unpublished. A deal-team member publishes it, and once published it is visible to every investor with access to the deal. The next investor with that question finds the answer already there.

There is also an automatic path: closing a question drafts a Knowledgebase entry from the resolved thread, left unpublished for the deal team to review and publish or discard on their own schedule. Nothing reaches investors automatically — publication is always a deliberate human action, the same as posting a response.

Rule of thumb: promote when a question is recurring and its answer is evergreen (still true next month). Leave it threaded when the answer is specific to one investor's situation or likely to change. A Knowledgebase full of one-off answers is worse than a small one covering the questions every investor actually asks.

What each side sees

The two sides of Q&A are deliberately asymmetric. An investor sees their own questions and answers, plus the published Knowledgebase. They do not see other investors' questions, the deal team's internal triage, or which answers started as AI drafts. The deal team sees the full incoming stream, AI drafts before they are edited, the priority and category controls, and the analytics on how Q&A is handled. This is the same boundary the engagement analytics page describes from the other direction: the deal team holds the operational view; the investor holds the deal view.

Q&A and readiness

Q&A is not only a support channel — its completeness is one input to a deal's readiness score. A deal where most questions are answered and the Knowledgebase has real coverage scores higher than one with a backlog of open questions and an empty Knowledgebase, because an investor entering the first deal has a materially better diligence experience than one entering the second. The full readiness formula and its other inputs are on the Transactions and deal workflows page.