Hurdle Advisory — AI workflows for investment firms

Why this is different

Not another platform.

Every AI vendor calling your firm right now is selling a new system: another login, another rollout, another per-seat invoice. Hurdle was set up to work differently.

The pitch you keep hearing

"Move your workflow into our platform."

Your team learns a new interface, your data gets copied somewhere new, and someone has to own the rollout. If it doesn't stick, you're still paying for the contract.

How we work

"Keep your workflow. We build into it."

We sit with your team, find the work that eats their week, and automate it inside the tools they already use. Deals still land in the CRM and files stay where they've always been. Your team keeps working the way they work now, minus the busywork.

The best adoption plan is not needing one.

What we build

Built for the work your team actually does.

We'd rather show than claim. Cards marked live demo available run against real-world examples — ask, and we'll run one in front of you. The rest we build the same way: inside your systems, with human approval on every write.

Every meeting

briefed before, captured after

Pre-meeting brief

Who you're meeting, every thread and note your firm has with them, and what's still open — in your inbox before you walk in.

your calendarone page

Meeting notes → CRM → recap

The meeting gets captured, the CRM updated, and a recap drafted for the team. Nothing is filed until you've approved it.

notes → CRMyou approve

Every deal

the paperwork layer

Deal intake, end to end

Financials, sector, and banker details extracted from the teaser and checked against your pipeline. One approval, and it's in your CRM.

live demo availableemail → CRM

NDA review & redlining

Scored against your playbook, redlined as real tracked changes in the counterparty's own Word document. You approve every edit.

live demo availableplaybook scoring

CIM screening one-pagers

A 90-page CIM becomes a one-pager in your Excel template — uncertainty flagged.

live demo availableyour template

Auto logged post-mortems

When a deal closes or dies, the whole arc is written up and filed while it's still fresh.

every deal teachesfiled to your CRM

Every week

the operating rhythm

Email monitoring & auto-drafting

Your deals inbox is watched around the clock: new mail is triaged, urgent threads are flagged, and replies land in your drafts folder already sounding like you. Sending stays a human act.

live demo availablestaged, never sent

Monday morning meeting prep

Pipeline, the week's meetings, and open items — one brief, in everyone's inbox before the Monday meeting.

every Mondayone brief

CRM stays current

Deal intake and meeting capture keep records fresh, without anyone typing. Pipeline reviews stop starting with data cleanup.

no manual entryalways current

How an engagement works

Start small, gate everything, earn trust.

Pick one workflow

Deal intake, NDA turnarounds, CIM screening: pick something that hurts every week. We map it with your team, edge cases included.

Build inside your stack

The automation lives in your CRM, mailbox, and file shares, under your own tenant and permissions. Your security team reviews everything before it runs.

Human approval on every write

The AI proposes and your analyst approves, straight from their inbox. Every action is recorded and any of them can be undone.

Ungate as trust is earned

Once a step has proven itself over live deal flow, you decide what runs on its own. The controls stay yours either way.

Governance

Controls an investor would ask for.

Hurdle comes from the investing side of the table, where the job included asking managers hard questions about process and controls. The automation we build has to survive those same questions.

Approval before action

Every write to your CRM or files waits for an authorized person to say yes. Approvals happen over email, so there's no new tool to check.

A full audit trail

Every change is recorded with before-and-after values, who approved it, and when. There's never a question of what the AI proposed and what a person authorized.

Everything is revertible

Approved something by mistake? Any change can be rolled back from its journal entry, and the rollback gets recorded too.

Escalates instead of guessing

When the system hits low confidence, an ambiguous match, or a document it can't read, it flags a person rather than pushing through a guess.

Permissions that default to no

New users can read but not approve until an admin turns them on. Spoofed or unauthorized replies get quarantined and reported.

Your tenant, your data

Everything runs inside your Microsoft and CRM environment. There's no Hurdle database holding your deal flow.

About

Founded by an investor, not a software vendor.

Hurdle was started by Jonathan after 10+ years in private equity, across three different middle market and lower middle market buyout firms. It exists because most AI pitches reaching PE firms come from people who have never sat through a Monday pipeline meeting.

That background shows up in the work. We've read teasers where the EBITDA adjustment hides in a footnote, watched a CRM decay one rushed Friday at a time, and lost deal-days to NDAs stalled over nothing. We also learned which corners can't be cut. You won't spend the first month explaining your world to us.

The other half is full-time depth in what current AI does reliably and what it doesn't do yet. We'll tell you which is which. We'd rather build one workflow your team trusts than sell ten they won't use.

FAQ

Questions we always get.

"Can't we just use the tools we've built in-house?"

In-house tools usually still need a human to kick them off, they're hard to roll out firm-wide safely, and they go stale in 6–12 months as the models change. Keeping them current is a full-time job (and it leaves when the builder does).

"Why not have our analyst do this?"

They should — the judgment parts. But it's not efficient for them to stay on top of the latest tools, build AI workflows, scale them to the firm, and maintain them so they don't break. Let us do that.

"What if the AI gets something wrong?"

It gets caught at the gate: nothing commits without a named person's approval. Every committed change is journaled with its before-image, so a mistake is a one-click revert.

"Is our data used to train models?"

No. Firm accounts on commercial terms mean your data is never used to train models, and everything runs inside your own tenant.

"Who exactly does the work?"

A seasoned investment professional as your one accountable point of contact, with vetted specialist engineering behind every deployment.

"What does an engagement look like?"

An ongoing managed service: Hurdle acts as your outsourced AI partner. AI is changing quickly, so we deploy the best use of it today, maintain what we build, and keep your firm ahead of the curve as the models improve. And everything we build belongs to your firm; if we part ways, you keep it all.

Frontier AI, applied realistically.