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
What is Smart Q&A and how does it work for M&A due diligence?
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 for M&A deal teams managing buyer questions?
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 available on the Business plan ($40/admin/month).
How does Peony's AI draft answers when a PE buyer submits due diligence questions?
When a PE buyer submits a diligence question in Peony's Smart Q&A, the AI instantly reads every document in the data room — CIMs, financial models, contracts, and corporate records — 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. The sell-side team then reviews the draft, edits if needed, and approves it before the answer reaches the buyer. This cuts response time from days to hours while keeping the deal team in full control of every answer that goes out.
Does Smart Q&A let an M&A advisor route financial questions to the CFO and legal questions to counsel?
Yes. Peony's Smart Q&A routes each buyer question to the right deal team member based on topic — financial questions go to the CFO, legal questions to counsel, operational questions to the COO. This eliminates the bottleneck where a single banker or advisor triages everything, and ensures every answer is approved by someone with domain expertise before it reaches the buyer or their counsel.
Is there a compliance-grade audit trail for Q&A that PE allocators and regulators can review?
Peony logs every interaction in Smart Q&A with timestamps and user attribution: every question submitted by a buyer or LP, every AI draft generated, every manual edit by the deal team, and every approval. The sell-side can also apply controlled redaction to permanently black out sensitive information in deal files before bidders or allocators access them. This compliance-grade audit trail is essential for M&A transactions, LP due diligence, 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-ready, GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA compliance.
How much does Smart Q&A cost for a boutique M&A advisory firm running diligence?
Peony includes Smart Q&A on the Business plan ($40/admin/month, 1 TB storage, 1,000 AI credits/month). AI-drafted answers, role-based routing, and the full audit trail are all included — no per-question fees. The Free ($0, 2 GB) and Pro ($20/admin/month, 200 GB) plans include 10 and 200 AI credits per month respectively. 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 buyer or investor 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 the deal team from drafting the same answer twice and ensures consistency across multiple bidder groups asking overlapping diligence questions.
Related features
Auto-Indexing
Automatically classify, tag, and make every uploaded document searchable with full-text search and OCR.
AI Rooms
Set up data rooms faster with AI-powered folder templates, missing document detection, and completeness scoring.
Team Collaboration
Invite your team, assign roles, and manage documents together from a shared workspace.