Tracelight

This is a full Commercial Due Diligence, run end-to-end in Tracelight. It generates deliverables fast, of course, in our web app or any Office surface, in the style your firm likes. But what I really love is the new things it can do: - Builds dynamic HTML explainers on the fly: a clickable driver tree for your market size, an interactive Sankey for the customer cube. All powered by live Excel models. The point is getting to the so-what faster. - Links everything together. Click a number in the PowerPoint or the HTML, land in the Excel. Click a source number in the Excel, see the PDF it was transcribed from. The work was never meant to be split across different Office apps, that's just what we had to do before we had agents. We're bringing it back together, and creating a new way to do the work. 

I still remember the final steerco of a 4-week DD I did at McKinsey. A mahogany table, our team on one side, clients lined up in dark suits on the other. Twenty minutes in, our client asked the question every analyst dreads: "On page 43, you say EBITDA is $42.1m. But on page 9 it's 44. Why is that?" Well, today Tracelight is stepping in to prevent the next generation from experiencing this trauma. Introducing Citations in PPT. Every number and chart in your presentation now links back to the Excel file it came from. Check the source directly in our PowerPoint add-in or web app. If the numbers change in the source Excel, Tracelight will automatically flag it back in PowerPoint. That means you never have to worry about stale numbers in your deck ever again.

Financial Due Diligence is changing fast. In this video, Tracelight runs an end-to-end FDD workflow. This is the new way our FDD customers work with AI. It’s not just about creating outputs - although Tracelight can obviously do that. It’s about how the platform helps users validate, understand and sign-off on the work. Every number comes with a citation, and Tracelight builds spreadsheet-powered HTML artefacts that help a user understand analysis 10x faster than digging through cells. This workflow relies on skills that we build alongside our enterprise customers, so the output is exactly what they want every time. It’s been incredible to watch the progress in FDD. Just nine months ago, our first FDD customers were using the Tracelight Excel add-in to build formulas and do basic checks. Today they’re using the platform to run the work end-to-end. I can only imagine where we will be another nine months from now.

Today we're launching the Tracelight Platform. The only AI workspace where advisors and dealmakers can orchestrate work end-to-end, with a purpose-built harness that handles the highest-stakes tasks at a level foundation models alone can't reach. - Start from the source materials, pull market data, build and review models, generate PowerPoints or interactive deliverables, send emails. - Use citation, audit trails, versioning, and the world’s best Model Review. Performance only matters when you can trust it. - Dive into the underlying Office applications with add-ins for Excel, PowerPoint, and Word, and continue with Tracelight there. Each task done by the best LLM for it. Skills built specifically for your firm. Your templates, structure, and standards. Tracelight is the one place you need to work with AI to deliver at the highest level. Try it now at tracelight.ai

Today, 𝗧𝗿𝗮𝗰𝗲𝗹𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁 is launching Spreadsheet Apps. For the first time, you can turn your Excel models into interactive, shareable apps that calculate live in the browser. Your spreadsheet is no longer just a file. It’s the back-end of any app you want to build. Here’s just a few things that makes possible: 📊 𝗘𝘅𝗽𝗹𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝗱𝗲𝗮𝗹𝘀 𝗹𝗶𝘃𝗲: toggle scenarios, adjust assumptions, and watch dashboards update instantly during meetings 📈 𝗕𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱 𝗱𝘆𝗻𝗮𝗺𝗶𝗰 𝗘𝗕𝗜𝗧𝗗𝗔 𝗯𝗿𝗶𝗱𝗴𝗲𝘀: switch base periods and drill into different categories 💸 𝗔𝗻𝗶𝗺𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝗰𝗮𝘀𝗵 𝗳𝗹𝗼𝘄: use interactive Sankey diagrams to visualise exactly how cash flows through a business 📝 𝗚𝗲𝗻𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗿𝗲𝗽𝗼𝗿𝘁𝘀: embed responsive, calculation-driven charts directly into your commentary Your job is to create a story from complex data. Spreadsheet Apps are a new way to do that. Try them today at tracelight[dot]ai

Four months ago I left my job in PE to join an AI startup. The usual hook would be to say I felt scared trading in my Third Space membership and those guaranteed future earnings, but to be honest, I only felt relief. Jobs like that bring security, training and a clear career path that’s not to be taken lightly, but you can easily slip into planning your life and career in measurements of years, rather than asking whether the work actually fulfils you today. My honest reflections so far: I worried at first if I was playing it safe by joining a team building for consulting and finance. It turns out that every day has brought something completely new: • From never having opened Claude Code, to deploying an internal app • From hours of iteration on my first prompt for a customer, to designing a library of skills and workflows that analyst me would have killed for • From cringing at the idea of posting on LinkedIn, to being here now... I worried that I’d be losing the benefit of having lots of senior leaders with years of experience to learn from: • I’ve instantly gone from being the youngest to (almost) the oldest in the office. Plainly, there is not always someone in the team that has seen the thing I am trying to do before and I can often end up being the default authority on something. Fun in some areas, maybe less so on taxes, expense policy, what the appropriate quantity for an office Huel order is… • Knowledge gets passed on from people at every level, not just from those with 30 years’ experience. Most of my colleagues have at least a 5-year head start on a lot of the skills that I am guaranteed to need going forwards • And what I’ve (re)gained through my lovely, intensely smart new colleagues is an appreciation for what being properly motivated to come into work every day feels like It won’t be the right move for everyone, but might be for you. At Tracelight, we're hiring AI Deployment Leads from consulting, investment banking, and PE backgrounds - to help build the AI infrastructure that the world's biggest consultancies and finance firms will run on. If you're ambitious, interested in AI, and want to build a massive company with a team that knows how to have fun along the way, DM me or click the link in the comments!