Three places existing tooling fails PE deal teams
01 — Pre-deal: too slow, too expensive, too one-shot Bain / McKinsey / BCG deliver an excellent diligence pack — for £200–500k and 8–12 weeks. By the time you've done it, the auction has moved.
02 — Post-deal: portfolio monitoring is reported, not measured The portco's CMO presents quarterly. You believe them. Sometimes. By the time a problem shows up in their numbers, you've lost 2 quarters of trajectory.
03 — Bolt-on identification: pattern-match, not pattern-find You back consumer theses based on what the deal team already believes. Theia surfaces the actual demand structure of a category — including the small brands inside it that fit your thesis but aren't being marketed to you.
Three Theia engagement shapes for PE
Pre-deal — the "4-week brand health" pack
- Demand: category search demand + trajectory + AI Overview citation share
- Visibility: organic share-of-voice in the target's categories
- Sales: third-party estimates for portfolio share movement
- Perception: feature × sentiment × competitor matrix from 50K+ snippets
Delivered in 4 weeks. £40–60k all-in. Comparable analytical depth to a £300k Bain engagement, at 5–10× the speed.
Post-deal — continuous portfolio monitoring
- Monthly L1-L3 strategy briefs per portco
- Sentiment trajectory tracking (when does perception start moving?)
- Competitive watch (new competitor SKUs, new content positioning)
- AI Overview citation share evolution
£3-9k / portco / month. For a 6-portco portfolio: £18-54k / month = £216-648k / year for board-grade evidence across the entire consumer book.
Bolt-on identification — category demand structure mapping
- Run a full segment audit on a thesis category (e.g. premium pet food, beauty actives, niche audio)
- Surface the long tail of small brands consumers already validate
- Match against acquisition criteria
£15-25k per category audit, one-shot.
The anchor proof — Principality (in the PE-deal framing)
Imagine Principality Building Society as a hypothetical PE target. The 4-week brand health pack would have told the deal team:
- Brand momentum: +86% (the fastest in the category — convertible tailwind)
- Visibility gap: 12.9% coverage / 2.6% click share (the operational fix)
- Experience weakness: mobile app sentiment −0.52 (the digital-investment thesis)
- Defensible niche: Welsh first-time-buyer, unowned by peers (the differentiation play)
This pack would have shaped both the diligence question and the post-deal value-creation plan. Same engine, same data, applied to the deal-team's question rather than the brand's.
Read the full Principality case →
The post-deal proof — Bose Germany
A 10-day pilot on Bose's German headphone market uncovered a €1.8M opportunity invisible to dashboards: Bose converts generic search traffic 10× better than Soundcore but captures 13× less of it.
A CMO might not surface this to a board. A continuous Theia subscription does — every quarter, across every portco.
Why PE is a natural fit
01 — Hold horizon matches Theia's value curve Theia compounds in value over 18-24 months: more data, more signal, more comparison points. Your hold cycle is exactly that.
02 — Repeatability across portfolio Same engine, every portco. No new vendor relationship per deal. No new training. No new methodology paper.
03 — Speed of evidence beats slide quality at deal stage Bain delivers a beautiful 80-slide pack. Theia delivers a 11-slide structured analysis backed by 90K snippets. At deal speed, the latter is more useful.
Engagement options
Option A — One-deal pilot
Pick the next consumer / retail / brand deal in your pipeline. We run a 4-week brand health pack. You evaluate. £45k flat.
Option B — Annual portfolio subscription
Pick 3-6 existing portcos. We run continuous L1-L3 across them. £20-60k / month depending on count + markets.
Option C — Category thesis project
Pick a thesis category your firm is exploring. We map the full demand structure + surface bolt-on candidates. £20-30k, 6 weeks.
A 30-minute conversation gets you a worked proposal in 48 hours.