A 200-page presentation ought to contain an answer. Frederik Kofoed Hansen’s problem was finding the answer behind the answer. During his time at Blackstone, a commercial due diligence report could arrive with its conclusions neatly arranged, while the evidence supporting a particular finding remained several emails away. A slide could be read in seconds. Understanding how it had earned its confidence could take days.
This is a wonderfully expensive way to develop an appreciation for footnotes. Hansen was working in private equity, commissioning research to help evaluate acquisitions. The questions were concrete: would customers stay, could prices rise, how much room did a business have to grow? The resulting report helped inform decisions involving considerable sums. Yet investigating a conclusion could still mean asking somebody else to go and look.
Now the co-founder and CEO of DiligenceSquared, Hansen has turned that irritation into a product principle. Commercial research should be open to inspection. If a finding matters enough to influence an investment, the investor should be able to follow it down to the interview or dataset beneath it. His company’s ambition begins with a modest action: a client clicking on a claim.
Before the buyouts, a question about fees
There is an earlier version of this interest in the work he completed at Copenhagen Business School. In May 2016, Hansen submitted a master’s thesis titled Active Mutual Fund Performance for an M.Sc. in Finance & Investments. It examined whether measures of active management could help identify better-performing equity funds in large European markets and smaller markets around the world.
The thesis concerned a familiar investing puzzle: what, exactly, does the customer receive for the fee? Among its subjects were funds whose holdings stayed close to a benchmark despite charging for active management. His findings were qualified by market and methodology. More activity did not produce one convenient answer everywhere. The detail mattered.
It would be too tidy to turn a student paper into a founding prophecy. The connection is narrower, and more interesting: years before he began selling research, Hansen was testing the relationship between a financial service, its price and the evidence of its value. His public education record also says he graduated first in his class. Later, he would scrutinize a different bill.
Six years on the buying side
Hansen spent six years at Blackstone, working across London, New York and San Francisco, and became a principal in its private equity team. His work included multi-billion-dollar buyouts. He commissioned dozens of substantial commercial research engagements, giving him repeated exposure to what investors found useful and what made the process cumbersome.
The experience supplied a particular kind of founder knowledge. He had been the customer with a decision approaching, rather than an observer admiring a large consulting market from a safe distance. The work had to support a transaction. A conclusion about customer loyalty or competitive strength was useful only if the deal team could understand how much weight to put on it.
In his January 2026 writing about the industry, Hansen described a process shaped by the economics of consultant time. Teams conduct interviews, synthesize findings and assemble presentations. He also acknowledged why the established firms retained their place: investors value judgment, credible work and personal support when time is short. Replacing the production process would still leave those demands intact.
A customer, a consultant and an engineer
DiligenceSquared brought together founders who had occupied different positions in that process. Hansen had bought the research at Blackstone. Søren Biltoft-Knudsen had delivered it as a principal in BCG’s private equity practice. Their fellow co-founder Harshil Rastogi came from software engineering at Google. The company joined Y Combinator’s Fall 2025 batch.
The idea took shape in San Francisco. By April 2026, Hansen and Biltoft-Knudsen were working from New York, closer to their customers. In an interview that month, Hansen described serving private equity funds in both the United States and Europe. He also outlined a planned balance between engineers and business staff, with people continuously checking the work.
His response to competition was unusually relaxed for somebody building a new firm. He argued that cheaper research could expand demand, allowing smaller transactions to support analysis that had previously been too expensive. In that view, another supplier could help enlarge the market. The opportunity lay partly in decisions that had gone without a report at all.
The interview still needs a good question
The mechanics make that ambition easier to understand. DiligenceSquared uses AI voice agents to interview experts. The agents work from a research brief, ask follow-up questions and carry out conversations in more than 30 languages. Experienced consultants help establish what the research should investigate and review what comes back.
Hansen and Biltoft-Knudsen have drawn a useful boundary around the automation. Early exploratory conversations can benefit from a human interviewer because the team is still discovering which questions deserve asking. Once the hypotheses and priorities are clearer, the AI moderator can conduct a broader, more systematic interview program. The brief becomes a consequential piece of work.
The company has also measured the experience of people answering those questions. Its August 2026 account reported feedback from 320 experts across 12 diligence projects: 91% rated the interview four or five out of five. That is company-collected feedback, with a defined sample, rather than a universal verdict on machine interviewing. It nevertheless puts an observable test beside the product claim.
For Hansen, this division of labor carries a business consequence. A consultancy built around AI still needs consultants. His hiring announcements have introduced business leads alongside engineers, including people with experience at BCG and McKinsey. He is assembling a firm that can both build the system and explain why its output matters to an investor.
Rated their AI-moderated interview 4 or 5 out of 5
The arithmetic beneath the ambition
By September 2026, Hansen’s public writing had moved beyond interviews to the construction of bottom-up market models. Co-writing with Biltoft-Knudsen, he described separating the market already being served from the larger opportunity a business might eventually address. The distinction can change an investment discussion before anybody touches the forecast.
A car wash example makes the point pleasantly literal. Counting vehicles is only a beginning. A model also needs assumptions about which vehicles can use the service, how frequently drivers wash them, what they pay and whether they buy subscriptions. A large population of cars does not automatically become revenue. Even a promising market must occasionally queue for the wash.
Their approach combines company disclosures, public information, purchased datasets and expert interviews. It makes assumptions visible, including uncertainty around inputs that cannot be observed directly. Hansen’s concern here is recognizably the investor’s: understand what must happen underneath a forecast before accepting the forecast itself. A number becomes more useful when its moving parts can be challenged.
“When a finding matters to an investment decision, you should be able to see what supports it.”
Frederik Kofoed Hansen · September 2026
Reading a business through its hiring
Another addition arrived in August: workforce analysis based on public professional profiles. Hansen and Biltoft-Knudsen described using changes in staffing to examine a company’s direction, from geographic expansion to the balance between engineering and commercial roles. For a private business with intermittent financial disclosures, hiring can offer another way to investigate its development.
The attraction is the ability to test a company’s account of itself against something observable. An international expansion story gains substance when there are people being hired in the relevant markets. A change in functional mix may help explain where management is placing its resources. Headcount alone cannot settle an investment case, but it gives the next question somewhere specific to begin.
This also reveals the shape of Hansen’s ambition. DiligenceSquared is broadening the material an investor can inspect, while keeping the interpretation close to the research. Interviews, workforce information and market models answer different questions. Together, they offer more ways to examine a business than a single summary chart can accommodate.
A firm built for the follow-up
By summer 2026, there were named transactions alongside the product explanations. DiligenceSquared announced that it had acted as market due diligence adviser on NTI’s acquisition of DiRoots in June, and on Polaris’s investment in TEFCOLD in August. Such engagements place the company’s work in the ordinary machinery of acquisitions, where research has to answer a client’s particular question.
Hansen’s April ambitions extended to offices across Europe and additional offices in the United States within two years. That was an aspiration, rather than a map of an existing network. The present task was more immediate: recruiting, delivering engagements and building a working relationship between the people conducting analysis and the engineers automating parts of it.
There is a lighter account of that growing organization, too. Hansen shared a company post announcing a sports sponsorship: five employees and friends playing soccer in New York. The opening result was a rainy 7-5 loss. The company’s investment vocabulary survived the scoreline, with optimism preserved on the grounds that the opponents had reached the previous season’s final. Evidently, there is always another way to assess the evidence.
The recurring question in Hansen’s professional story is less forgiving. What supports the conclusion? It appears in his examination of fund performance, his frustration as a buyer of research and the tools his team is building now. At DiligenceSquared, the practical promise is that a reader can keep asking. A finding leads to an analysis, an analysis to a quotation, a quotation to an interview. The next question should have somewhere to go.