Answer 300 due diligence questions in days, not weeks
Smart Q&A isn't a chatbot — it's a structured, multi-party workflow. Counterparties submit questions inside the data room. AI drafts answers from your documents with citations. Your team reviews, approves, and responds. Every step is permissioned and auditable. Available on the Business plan.
How it works
Four steps from question to approved answer — with AI doing the heavy lifting and your team in full control.
Investor submits a question
A counterparty — investor, buyer, or auditor — submits a question directly inside the data room. Each party sees only their own thread.
AI drafts an answer with citations
Peony instantly reads your documents and drafts a response, citing the exact files and pages. No manual searching required.
Your team reviews the draft
The assigned team member reviews the AI-drafted answer, edits if needed, and approves. Financial questions route to the CFO, legal to counsel.
Approved answer is sent back
Once approved, the answer is delivered to the counterparty inside the data room. Every step is logged in the audit trail.
For larger deals, Peony supports an advanced 5-role workflow with question drafters, submitters, auto-assigned experts, answer coordinators, and approvers — so every answer is reviewed by the right person before it reaches the counterparty.
Workflow intelligence, not just answers
AI-drafted answers with citations
Peony reads every document in your data room and drafts a response to each question — citing the exact file and page. Your team reviews instead of researching from scratch.
Permission-aware threads
Different investor or buyer groups only see their own Q&A threads. Internal sell-side discussions stay private. No accidental leaks between counterparties.
Role-based approval routing
Route answers through the right team members before they reach counterparties. Financial questions go to your CFO, legal questions to counsel. No bottlenecks, no missed approvals.
Compliance-grade audit trail
Every question, AI draft, manual edit, and approval is logged with timestamps and user attribution. A complete record for compliance reviews and post-deal audits.
Replaces email chains and Excel trackers
All Q&A happens in one structured channel inside the data room. No more scattered inboxes, forwarded threads, or version conflicts in shared spreadsheets.
Built for every deal type
M&A due diligence
Buyers submit 300+ questions during due diligence. AI drafts answers from your financial models, contracts, and corporate documents. Your team reviews and approves. What used to take weeks takes days.
Fundraising Q&A
Investors ask about revenue, burn rate, and cap table. AI finds the answers in your financials and drafts responses with exact citations. Duplicate questions are flagged so you never answer the same thing twice.
Regulatory reviews
Auditors ask compliance questions. AI surfaces the relevant policies and procedures from your document index. Full audit trail for every interaction — every question, draft, and approval logged with timestamps.
Legacy Q&A is a bottleneck. Peony replaces it.
Legacy VDRs like Ideals, Firmex, and Digify offer basic Q&A threads with no AI. Your team manually searches through hundreds of documents for every question, copies and pastes answers into a thread, and hopes nothing falls through the cracks.
Peony's Smart Q&A is a complete workflow: AI drafts answers with citations, role-based routing sends each question to the right approver, and every interaction is logged in a compliance-grade audit trail. Set up in under 5 minutes.
Need to research your own documents first?
AI Extraction is your internal research tool — ask questions across your data room and get instant, cited answers before the deal starts.
"Every now and then, you come across a product that has a massive positive impact on your business. Peony is one such product."
Panos Moutafis
Founder & CEO, Zenus
Frequently asked questions
Our 4-person deal team fields 50+ buyer diligence questions per week on a $120M sell-side mandate — how does Smart Q&A keep us from drowning?
On Peony Business ($40/admin/month), Smart Q&A follows a structured 4-step workflow: your bidders submit questions, AI drafts cited answers from your CIM and diligence files, your team reviews and edits each draft, and approved answers go back to the specific bidder who asked. For your $120M mandate with 50+ weekly questions, this turns a manual email burden into a streamlined queue. AI handles the first-pass research across every document in your room, and your team only reviews — cutting response time from days to hours. Ideals, Firmex, and Digify offer only basic Q&A threads with no AI assistance.
I'm a partner at a mid-market law firm managing a $75M acquisition — can Smart Q&A route financial questions to the CFO and legal questions to my associates automatically?
Yes. On Business ($40/admin/month), Smart Q&A routes each buyer question to the right member of your deal team based on topic — financial questions go to the CFO, legal questions to your associates, operational questions to the COO. For your $75M acquisition, this eliminates the bottleneck where a single partner triages everything, and ensures every answer is approved by someone with domain expertise before it reaches buyer counsel.
Our PE fund is raising a $200M continuation vehicle with 30+ LPs submitting duplicate questions — can Smart Q&A detect that?
Yes. On Business ($40/admin/month), when an LP submits a question in Smart Q&A, the AI flags semantically similar questions that have already been asked and answered — even if the wording is different. For your $200M CV with 30+ LP cohorts, this prevents your IR team from drafting the same answer about GP economics or valuation methodology multiple times and ensures consistency across all LP groups receiving the same information — critical for ILPA's parity-of-information standard.
We're a boutique advisory staffing a $45M carve-out with just 2 analysts — is Smart Q&A different from AI Extraction?
Yes, they serve different roles. Smart Q&A is for external, structured communication — your bidders submit questions, AI drafts answers from your data room, and your 2-person team reviews before anything goes out. AI Extraction is your internal research tool — your analysts ask questions across documents and get instant, cited answers to prepare for management presentations or surface risks. For your $45M carve-out with a lean team, you use AI Extraction to prepare and Smart Q&A to manage the buyer dialogue. Both are on Business ($40/admin/month).
We're running a $90M SaaS competitive auction with 5 separate bidder groups — can each group's questions be kept isolated from the others?
Yes. On Business ($40/admin/month), Smart Q&A enforces strict permission-based visibility. Each of your 5 bidder groups sees only their own Q&A threads — there is no risk of one bidder seeing another's questions or your internal discussions. For your $90M SaaS auction, this is critical: a strategic buyer's technical questions about your API architecture stay invisible to the PE sponsor focused on EBITDA adjustments. All communications are secured with AES-256 encryption and SOC 2-ready infrastructure.
I'm GP counsel on a $150M fund and our compliance team needs a full audit trail of every Q&A exchange with LPs — does Smart Q&A produce that?
Yes. On Business ($40/admin/month), Peony logs every interaction in Smart Q&A with timestamps and user attribution: every question submitted by an LP, every AI draft generated, every manual edit by your IR team, and every approval. For your $150M fund, this compliance-grade audit trail satisfies regulatory review requirements and post-deal audits. Your compliance team can export the full record at any time. Ideals, Firmex, and Digify lack AI-powered Q&A and offer only basic thread history without this level of auditability.
Our boutique M&A shop runs $30M-$80M mandates — how much does Smart Q&A cost versus hiring another analyst to manage buyer questions?
Peony Business is $40/admin/month — so your team pays $160/month (4 admins) for Smart Q&A with AI-drafted answers, role-based routing, duplicate detection, and full audit trails. That is $1,920/year. A junior analyst costs $75,000-$100,000/year and still cannot draft cited answers from 500 documents in seconds. For your $30M-$80M mandates, Smart Q&A replaces the manual question-routing work that consumes 10+ analyst hours per week. Datasite charges enterprise pricing for comparable workflows, and Ideals, Firmex, and Digify have no AI in their Q&A modules at all.
I'm a PE associate managing ongoing LP communications on a $300M fund — can Smart Q&A handle quarterly inquiries, not just deal-specific diligence?
Yes. Smart Q&A on Business ($40/admin/month) works for any structured Q&A workflow — not just M&A diligence. For your $300M fund, your LPs can submit quarterly questions about portfolio performance, fee calculations, or distribution waterfalls, and AI drafts answers from the documents in your LP data room. Your IR team reviews and approves before responses go out. Over time, the system learns from prior approved answers, so recurring questions about fund terms or reporting methodology get faster and more consistent with each cycle.
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