Screen eighty targets like you mean to close one.

The funnel is the job — and it’s where the hours go

Every deal team lives the same arithmetic. To put one platform or bolt-on under LOI, you and your analysts wade through dozens of teasers, CIMs, and inbound pitches. Industry benchmarks put the ratio at roughly eighty targets reviewed for every deal that actually closes. Most of those eighty never deserved a second meeting — but you only learn that after an analyst has burned hours building a model, pulling filings, and chasing references.

The cost isn’t just the dead targets. It’s the opportunity cost: the good target your team didn’t get to because they were three days deep on one that was always going to die. In a market with more than nine thousand US PE deals a year and over a trillion dollars of dry powder competing for them, speed at the top of the funnel is not a luxury. It is the difference between seeing the deal and reading about it after someone else won.

You can’t hire your way out of an 80:1 funnel. You have to screen your way through it.

What manual screening misses

The deeper problem is that early screening, done by hand, is shallow by necessity. With limited hours per target, an analyst checks the obvious: revenue, growth, a quick Google. What they rarely catch this early is the thing that kills the deal in diligence three months later — the founder named in active litigation, the key subsidiary on a sanctions list, the customer concentration buried in a credit filing, the regulatory action that hasn’t hit the trade press yet.

Those signals exist in public and commercial data today. They are simply too dispersed to pull manually on every target at the top of a funnel this wide. So they wait — until you’ve already spent the LOI, the legal fees, and the political capital. The most expensive target is the one you pursue for ninety days before discovering what you could have known on day one.

Rubicon Deal Screen: the funnel, graded

Deal Screen runs Rubicon’s Intelligence Graph over external public and commercial data — litigation dockets, regulatory actions, sanctions and watchlists, corporate ownership, financial-health signals, and reputational record — against any target you point it at. In minutes, you get a structured, cited read on where the risk sits and where the upside is real. Not a black-box score: every finding links to the source record, so your IC sees exactly what you saw.

Room-agnostic, and on your side

The data room is the seller’s instrument — curated to tell their story. Rubicon is not a data room and not bound to one. It runs before the room exists, on targets that may never open one for you, and it answers to the buyer. That’s the point: the risk that kills a deal almost never lives in the documents the seller chose to share. It lives outside, in the record — which is exactly where the Intelligence Graph looks.

Speed without giving up depth

The usual trade at the top of the funnel is speed against depth: go fast and you go shallow, go deep and you go slow. Rubicon collapses that trade-off. The Graph pulls breadth no analyst could match by hand — courts, regulators, registries, sanctions lists, credit signals — and returns it in minutes, with the source attached. You get the depth of a real diligence pass at the speed of a first read, which is exactly what an 80:1 funnel demands.