A Digital Twin of the Business
You Are About to Buy
Plants, contracts, programmes, people, systems and P&L modelled as one linked object — and the market value chain it sits in. Change one thing and the whole picture moves. Built by our M&A team on the CorpDev.Ai platform for diligence, carve-outs and integration.
Diligence Produces Documents. Decisions Need a Model.
By the time a carve-out reaches the investment committee there are forty reports, three datapacks that do not reconcile, and a site-visit memo nobody has cross-read against the SPA. Each document is right on its own page. None of them show how the pieces move together.
Findings Live in Silos
Legal flags a change-of-control clause. Operations flags a single-source supplier. Finance flags a transfer-pricing true-up. The same plant appears in all three — and nobody has drawn the line between them.
Numbers That Don’t Reconcile
The seller’s datapack, the management presentation and the unit economics on the shop floor each tell a different story. Without one model behind them, the gap is invisible until it is priced.
Integration Planned From Memory
Day 1 arrives and the target state exists in the heads of the deal team. The twin keeps what was learned in diligence and turns it into the integration plan — on the same object, not a fresh deck.
Every Object Linked. That Is What Makes It a Twin.
A report describes a business. A twin links it. Every contract, programme, product, plant, supplier, role, system and P&L line is an object in the model, connected to the objects it depends on — so a change anywhere propagates everywhere.
Ask the Model, Not the Archive
Once the twin exists, the questions that used to take a week of cross-reading take a prompt. Which customer contracts terminate on change of control — and which plant’s volume do they carry? If the seconded engineers roll off in year three, which programmes lose their design authority? Where does the parent subsidy actually land in the P&L?
- ✓
Every finding lands on a node
Legal, financial, operational and HR findings are pinned to the plant, contract or person they concern
- ✓
Reconciliation is explicit
Where the datapack and the twin disagree, the gap is a named item with an owner, not a footnote
- ✓
It stays alive after signing
Site visits, management sessions and the SPA mark-up update the same model the IC memo was built on
A diligence report
- One workstream, one document
- Findings listed, not located
- Numbers restated per author
- Frozen at delivery
- Integration starts from a blank deck
A digital twin
- Every workstream on one object
- Findings pinned to plants, contracts, people
- One set of numbers, gaps named
- Updated as the deal moves
- Day 1 and Month 36 drawn on the same model
Two Kinds of Twin
The market you are entering, and the company you are buying. Built the same way, and they connect: a target is placed on the value chain it lives in.
Market level
The Market Value-Chain Twin
Model the whole chain once, then place any target, competitor or deal on it
From raw materials to end markets and the aftermarket: every tier, the players in it, the flows between them, and where the margin pools. It is the map a strategy is drawn on — and the frame every subsequent target profile drops into.
- ▸ Tiers, players and concentration at each step
- ▸ Goods, technology and service flows drawn separately
- ▸ Margin pools and demand shifts by segment
- ▸ Consolidation activity and who is likely to move next
Company level
The Company Twin
A target, a carve-out or your own business unit, as one linked model
The value-creation flow from supply to customer, plant by plant, with unit economics at every step. Above it, the technology layer. Beneath it, the parent flows that stop at closing — the subsidies, shared services and group contracts that decide whether the standalone P&L holds.
- ▸ Site-by-site: lines, nameplate, utilisation, headcount, ownership
- ▸ Unit cost and margin at each stage of the flow
- ▸ Parent dependencies: TSA, IP, systems, secondments, shared sites
- ▸ Standalone cost and one-off separation, itemised
One Model, Three Uses
The twin built in diligence is the one the carve-out is priced on and the one integration is run from. Nothing is re-modelled between stages.
01 · Due diligence
Findings Land Where They Bite
Critical, high and medium findings from every workstream are pinned to the node they concern — an IP licence on the engineering plant, a partner veto on the joint venture, a supplier under strain on the machining site — alongside the dependencies and the opportunities on the same node. The picture the investment committee needs is the picture the deal team works from.
- ▸ Findings by node, severity and owner
- ▸ Site-visit question lists generated from open items
- ▸ Datapack-to-twin reconciliation as a tracked list
- ▸ Conditions precedent and SPA items traced to their source
02 · Carve-out 03 · Integration
Day 1 as Received. Month 36 as Intended.
The same twin drawn twice: the business as the seller hands it over — leased, seconded, wired into the parent — and the target state your operating model needs. Between them sits the transformation: which plant anchors what, which systems are rebuilt, which dependencies are cut and when. It becomes the integration roadmap, with gates and clocks, before the ink is dry.
Target state per node
Entity structure, plant role, people, systems and brand — as received versus as intended, with the principal dependency named.
Standalone and separation cost
Parent flows that stop at closing, TSA scope and duration, one-off separation items — itemised on the P&L lines they hit.
Roadmap with gates
Signing, Day 1, TSA exit and standalone as gates; the critical path and the hard deadlines drawn as workstreams.
How a Twin Gets Built
Our M&A team builds it with you, on the platform. The AI Analyst does the reading and the linking; people do the site visits and the judgement.
Load the room
The data room, management datapack and site-visit notes go into the AI Room, where every document is read, extracted and cited at file level.
Build the spine
Contracts, programmes, products, plants, suppliers, people, systems and P&L lines are extracted as objects and linked. Each object carries its sources.
Reconcile and question
Where sources disagree, the gap becomes a named item. Open items become the site-visit and management-session question lists.
Deliver and keep alive
The twin is a living document with its visualizations, site one-pagers, risk map, target state and roadmap — exported to PowerPoint, Word and Excel, updated as the deal moves.
What You Receive
The twin document
Executive summary, the layers, site-by-site view, financial view, people, systems, findings, target state, roadmap — with every figure sourced.
Site one-pagers
One page per plant: activities, headcount, revenue, volumes, capacity, customers, carve-out considerations and the critical questions for the visit.
The visualizations
Network, spine, value flow, people, systems, risk map, Day 1 versus target state, roadmap — drawn as isometric views people actually study.
Workbook and scenarios
Standalone cost, separation one-offs, TSA scope and the value envelope in a workbook you can open in Excel and change.
Your model, in open formats
Markdown, Excel and PowerPoint in your workspace. Nothing locked in, nothing left behind when the engagement ends.
We Build the Platform. We Also Work the Deal.
CorpDev.Ai is an AI developer and a service provider, specialized in M&A and corporate development. Digital twins are where the two meet: the platform reads, links and draws; our M&A team walks the plants and makes the calls with you.
The platform
Build twins in your own workspace
The AI Room, the AI Analyst, workbooks and visualizations are the tools the twin is built with. Corporate development teams use them directly, on their own deals.
The AI Analyst Agent →The service
Have our M&A team build it with you
For a live carve-out, an integration or a market you are entering: we scope the twin, build it inside the diligence window and keep it current through signing and the first year.
Managed Services →Questions
Is this a digital twin in the engineering sense — a simulation?
No. It is a linked information model of a business: every material object and its dependencies, with sources. It does not simulate physics or run a plant. It answers the questions a deal team asks — what depends on what, what breaks at closing, what the target state costs — from one consistent model instead of forty documents.
What does it need from us?
Access to the data room and the seller’s datapack, your deal thesis and operating-model intent, and whoever on your side joins the site visits. The twin is built in your CorpDev.Ai workspace, under your access controls.
Which businesses is it built for?
It earns its keep on carve-outs and multi-site industrial businesses — anywhere plants, contracts, people and systems are entangled with a parent or a partner. It works equally for a business unit you own and are preparing to separate or integrate.
Are the figures on this page real?
No. The visuals show a fictional industrial gearbox manufacturer. Every name, plant, contract and number is invented to show the shape of a twin. Client work is confidential and is never shown.
Model It Before You Sign It
Tell us about the carve-out, the integration or the market. We will show you the twin we would build and what it would answer.