At 2am, in the middle of billion-dollar transactions, Justin Hansky and Elena Tsalanidis were doing the same thing most corporate lawyers do: buried in spreadsheets, cross-checking documents, chasing versions across email threads, and trying to piece together a clear picture from thousands of files.
It was slow and painstakingly manual. And for something as high-stakes as due diligence, it felt surprisingly fragile.
“There has to be a better way,” they kept coming back to.
The insight: one of the most critical processes in M&A hasn’t changed
Buying and selling businesses is what keeps the economy moving. Every transaction depends on due diligence; the process of understanding what you’re actually buying, identifying risks, and building conviction before a deal is done.
But despite the scale and importance of that work, the process itself hasn’t meaningfully evolved.
There’s no single system. No real collaboration layer. No intelligent way to process the thousands of documents that sit inside a data room. Just email chains, constantly shifting shared folders, and manual review.
The consequences are real. Due diligence is slow, expensive, and often incomplete. It’s estimated that over 37% of insurance claims on M&A deals could have been avoided with proper legal diligence, but the reality is that many teams either can’t afford to do it thoroughly, or don’t have the time.
That gap became Deeligence.
Turning weeks of work into hours
Deeligence is built specifically for legal due diligence.
At its core, it functions like a project management system designed for lawyers, but with something fundamentally different underneath: an army of AI agents doing the heavy lifting.
As lawyers collaborate on a deal, the platform scans, summarises and analyses documents across the data room, flagging key risks and extracting relevant information. What would traditionally take weeks of manual effort is compressed into hours.
The output is immediate and practical: a client-ready due diligence report, fully formatted and beautifully structured, generated directly from the platform.
For lawyers, it removes the grind and for clients, it delivers faster, higher-quality insight.
Two lawyers who saw the same problem
Justin and Elena met on their first day of law school, sitting next to each other on a bus.
They went on to follow remarkably similar paths. Both moved into corporate law where they experienced the same inefficiencies firsthand. And eventually, they stepped into legal tech, where they began to see how the system could be rethought.
Over time, they kept arriving at the same conclusion: due diligence was broken, and no one was fixing it properly.
So they decided to.
Their backgrounds naturally complement the problem. Justin brings deep expertise across M&A, product and AI, having worked at Arnold Bloch Leibler, completed an MBA at London Business School, and led global customer success at legal tech company BRYTER. Elena combines legal experience with operational execution, having worked across corporate law, the Supreme Court, and legal tech company Lexoo, delivering complex legal projects for companies like Uber and Wise.
Together, they bring both the lived experience of the problem and the capability to build a solution that works in practice.
Building the default platform for due diligence
Since launching, Deeligence has grown quickly.
The platform is being used by thousands of lawyers globally and has supported deals worth billions of dollars. The impact is tangible; multiple customers measured over $1 million in value from the platform in their first year alone.
Growth has been consistent, with the company expanding across Australia, New Zealand, and into global markets including the US, UK and Africa.
In the short term, Deeligence is focused on expanding internationally, particularly into the UK and US, while continuing to build out its product and team.
But the long-term ambition is much larger. They’re building toward a world where no due diligence process runs without Deeligence; a system where AI agents don’t replace lawyers, but elevate them, making every lawyer as effective as the best in the room by combining human judgment with machine precision.
A different future for legal work
Today, much of legal work, particularly in due diligence doesn’t scale because it is still defined by time-intensive, manual processes.
Deeligence is betting on a different future. One where the heavy lifting is handled automatically, where risk is surfaced earlier, and where lawyers can focus on what actually matters: applying judgment, advising clients, and shaping outcomes.
Not just for the biggest firms, but for anyone doing deals.
The ask
If you know corporate lawyers or active corporate development teams in Australia, the UK or the US working on M&A or transactions, the team would love an introduction.
They’re also hiring across engineering and customer success, and looking to connect with strategic investors as they expand globally.
You can learn more at https://deeligence.com/ or reach out directly to the team.
Watch them pitch at Demo Day
When: Thursday, 30 April @ 7:00 PM (pre-party starting at 5 PM)
Where: Carriageworks (at the close of Blackbird's Sunrise Festival)
What: Pitch night (19 companies)
Tickets: Grab your ticket here
