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. Included on all plans.
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.
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
What is Smart Q&A in a data room?
Smart Q&A is Peony's structured, multi-party workflow for due diligence questions. Unlike a chatbot, it follows a formal 4-step process: a counterparty (investor, buyer, or auditor) submits a question, AI drafts an answer with citations from your documents, your team reviews and edits the draft, and the approved answer is sent back — all with role-based permissions and a compliance-grade audit trail. Legacy VDRs like Ideals, Firmex, and Digify offer only basic Q&A threads with no AI assistance.
How does Smart Q&A differ from AI Extraction?
Peony's Smart Q&A is for external, structured communication — counterparties submit questions, AI drafts answers, and your team approves before anything is shared. AI Extraction is a separate internal research tool where your own team asks questions across documents and gets instant, cited answers. Smart Q&A has approvals, routing, and audit trails; AI Extraction is immediate and informal. Both are included on all Peony plans.
How does AI draft answers during due diligence?
When a counterparty submits a question in Peony's Smart Q&A, the AI instantly reads every document in the data room — powered by Peony's Auto-Indexing engine, which indexes every word across PDFs, spreadsheets, and scanned files — and drafts a response citing the exact files and pages. Your team then reviews the draft, edits if needed, and approves it before the answer reaches the counterparty. This cuts response time from days to hours while keeping your team in full control of every answer that goes out.
Does Smart Q&A support role-based approval routing?
Yes. Peony's Smart Q&A routes each question to the right team member based on topic — financial questions go to your CFO, legal questions to counsel, technical questions to the CTO. This eliminates bottlenecks where a single person reviews everything, and ensures every answer is approved by someone with domain expertise before it reaches the counterparty.
Is there an audit trail for Q&A in the data room?
Peony logs every interaction in Smart Q&A with timestamps and user attribution: every question submitted, every AI draft generated, every manual edit, and every approval. Your team can also apply controlled redaction to permanently black out sensitive information in shared documents before counterparties access them. This compliance-grade audit trail is essential for M&A transactions, regulatory reviews, and post-deal audits. Ideals, Firmex, and Digify lack AI-powered Q&A and offer only basic thread history without this level of detail.
Can different investor groups see each other's questions?
No. Peony's Smart Q&A enforces strict permission-based visibility. Each counterparty — whether an investor group, buyer, or auditor — sees only their own Q&A threads. Internal sell-side discussions remain private. There is no risk of one bidder seeing another bidder's questions, which is critical for competitive auction processes and multi-party due diligence. All communications are secured with AES-256 encryption at rest and TLS 1.3 in transit, backed by SOC 2 Type II compliance.
How much does Smart Q&A cost?
Peony includes Smart Q&A on every plan: Free ($0, 2 GB storage), Pro ($20/admin/month, 200 GB), and Business ($40/admin/month, 1 TB). AI-drafted answers, role-based routing, and the full audit trail are all included — no add-ons or per-question fees. Competitors like Datasite charge enterprise pricing for comparable workflows, while Ideals, Firmex, and Digify have no AI in their Q&A modules at all.
Can Smart Q&A detect duplicate questions?
Yes. When a counterparty submits a question in Peony's Smart Q&A, the AI flags semantically similar questions that have already been asked and answered — even if the wording is different. This prevents your team from drafting the same answer twice and ensures consistency across multiple investor groups asking overlapping questions during due diligence.
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