Deals
Deals create unavoidable data work under deadline
Acquisitions, carve-outs, and divestitures force organizations, private equity firms, and their advisory teams – consulting firms, law firms, and investment banks – to work through massive volumes of files to close on time. What begins as understanding what exists quickly becomes deciding what moves, what stays, and what must be removed, across laptops, file shares, and cloud systems.
Most tools support only part of the journey. Guidance moves by email. Decisions are made in one place, execution happens somewhere else, and progress lives in spreadsheets. Under deadline pressure, teams default to what their tools allow, often moving too much, deleting too much, or relying on inconsistent manual effort.
The deal requires separating buyer and seller IP before closing.
Can hundreds of millions of files be identified, reviewed, and moved – across thousands of employees – in time to close?
AI for Deals
In large divestitures, separation must be completed before close – and must withstand regulatory and legal scrutiny later.
What if everyone on the deal had their own AI agent?
Octosight provides phase-specific AI agents that find what matters, surface sensitive information, and carry decisions forward under human oversight.
Pre-signing, advisors lead discovery and diligence. Post-signing, enterprise teams join through close. Octosight connects both sides end to end, keeping findings, decisions, and actions aligned as responsibility shifts.
Real World Use Case
In a $2B divestiture, 5,000 employees were required to review 395 million files to determine which data remained with the seller and which transferred to a private equity buyer. The data separation effort relied on six tools, stretched a 60-day regulatory timeline to 10 months, and cost $3M. Octosight is built for separations of this scale – reducing execution time, lowering headcount, and producing a defensible record of every decision.
Explore this Data Separation further →What Octosight Solves
When intellectual property must land on the correct side of a transaction before close, teams fall back on one of four imperfect options.
Leave everything
Leave data in place and accept ongoing commingling and future risk.
Delete everything
Wipe devices and file stores to reduce exposure, destroying valuable IP and disrupting operations when employees lose the files and emails they rely on.
Manual cleanup
Push guidance by email and track self-reported CTRL+F searches in spreadsheets, with no defensible record of what was actually reviewed.
Assemble a custom solution
Cobble together a Frankenstein system from parts, stand up cloud infrastructure, and write scripts to move data from system to system while the clock runs.
Separating data before close demands an approach that is fast, defensible, scalable, and built to meet regulatory scrutiny when required, including CFIUS, ITAR, and antitrust review.
How Deal Work Changes with Octosight
Octosight connects discovery, diligence, classification, and remediation into one continuous flow. AI agents surface what warrants human review and help apply decisions consistently across the enterprise, while humans stay in control.
What begins as a massive data set is narrowed step by step until information is preserved, moved to the correct side of the transaction, or permanently deleted, with clarity intact from start to finish.
Discovery — Find what matters
Discovery replaces scattered searches and manual review with forensic-grade keyword and topic search across enterprise-scale file environments. Files are reviewed in one place so teams can quickly narrow massive datasets to what moves forward.
Diligence — Make defensible decisions
Curated files are analyzed to answer questions, surface discrepancies, and complete diligence reports, with every conclusion tied back to reviewed source material.
Classification — Identify sensitive data before it moves
Sensitive personal, health, payment, and regulated information is identified across laptops, shared drives, and cloud storage. Teams gain visibility into data risk before systems are split or combined, without scanning everything blindly.
Remediation — Carry decisions through to action
Agents recommend actions, which humans review and confirm or correct. Approved actions are carried out automatically. Files are preserved for compliance, moved to the correct side of the transaction, or permanently deleted, with every action recorded and defensible.
Because Octosight retains the link between findings and files, actions can be applied not only to a single file, but to every copy of that file and every instance of the same content pattern across the organization. The result is a clean, executable boundary between buyer and seller.
Use Cases
- Buy-side and sell-side discovery and diligence
- Sensitive data classification and pre-integration health checks
- Sell-side data separation during TSA periods
- Buy-side CFIUS and ITAR data risk mitigation via deletion
Where to go next
- Lifecycle of a Deal → See how deal work unfolds across buy side and sell side, from formation through close
- How It Works → See how Octosight’s modules, features, and workflows support each phase of a deal
- Data Separation → See more detail on how a data separation works in the Remediation phase
- Who It’s For → See how organizations, private equity firms, consulting firms, law firms, and investment banks engage across the deal lifecycle
- Partners → Learn how consulting firms, law firms, and investment banks deliver client engagements using Octosight