CIMply Put: Why One Analyst Was Happier Than a Dog at a BBQ

There are a few things in this world that will always surprise me: 

• A toddler who naps on schedule 
• A car repair bill that’s lower than expected 
• And an analyst smiling after a 127-page CIM hits the team inbox at 4:45 on a Friday 

The last one happened to a client of ours. 

Picture it: 127 glorious, unstructured pages of financials, forecasts, market fluff, and a hockey-stick growth curve that would make the NHL jealous. 

And instead of sneaking out and mysteriously disappearing for the weekend, this analyst volunteers to take it on. 

I asked if the analyst was okay. Maybe he misunderstood the assignment. Maybe someone spiked his Celsius. 

Nope. 

He was using Egnyte AI. 

What’s in a CIM? (Besides Emotional Damage) 

If you’ve spent even a single deal cycle in private equity, you already know CIMs are a unique kind of pain. 

They’re long, inconsistent, and packed with information you need—but rarely where you need it. 

Reading them is like cleaning your garage. You know it has to happen. But instead, you try to put it off, until you eventually find yourself buried under a pile of dusty EBITDA estimates from 2017. 

Here’s how it usually goes down at most firms: 

1. Analyst opens the CIM 
2. Analyst sighs audibly 
3. Analyst disappears into PDF purgatory for 6 hours 
4. Copy-pasting financials into Excel 
5. Manually benchmarking KPIs 
6. A lot of Ctrl+F, and even more Ctrl+Z 
7. And files named “FINAL_FINAL_3-REALLYFINAL” 

Sound familiar? 

And when analysts try using consumer AI tools to help? 

Well, congratulations—you now have a rogue AI assistant with zero audit trail. Suddenly, compliance and legal have to get involved, and things got really awkward. 

Then Came Egnyte AI (a.k.a. Analyst Therapy) 

Now? The same analyst chats with the CIM as if it were an on-demand panel of expert witnesses. 

• “What’s the YoY revenue growth?” 
• “Summarize the management section.” 
• “Any customer concentration risks?” 

Egnyte Copilot gives instant answers. Prompts extract KPIs and financial highlights and can be saved for easy reuse. AI agents flag red flags—no pun intended. 

Boom. Structured, sourced, and it will even draft the memo. 

He even beat his VP to the punch with a side-by-side comp from a deal two years ago—found instantly with Egnyte’s natural language search. 

It’s like having a junior associate who doesn’t sleep, doesn’t snack, and doesn’t complain about Excel models. 

The Best Part? It’s not Just Fast and Reliable AI, It’s Secure AI  

Because it’s all built inside Egnyte, there’s no copy/pasting into consumer tools. No exporting sensitive data into the AI wild west. No angry IT people storming your desk with a PowerPoint titled “Data Governance Is Not a Suggestion.” 

Everything stays secure, governed, and auditable. Permissions apply. Logs exist.  

Compliance breathes a sigh of relief. And your deal team can finally pick a restaurant for dinner instead of retyping EBITDA margins. 

I like to call it “AI without the OMG.” 

What Firms Are Seeing 

The results are real—and replicable. Here's what our clients are experiencing: 

• CIM review time cut by up to 90% 
• 4x more targets analyzed per analyst 
• Fewer manual errors 
• No ungoverned AI tools in use 
• Data sprawl? Down to zero 
• Smiles per hour? Way up 

“Egnyte fits into how we already work and has allowed us to screen 30% more deals, allowing us to uncover opportunities we otherwise couldn’t have without more headcount.” 
— Director of IT, Mid-Market PE Firm 

CIMply Put: This Is the Future 

Private equity teams don’t need another disconnected AI tool that bolts onto your process like an IKEA shelf installed by someone who refused to read the instructions. 

They need a faster, smarter way to work—without adding risk or reinventing workflows. 

Egnyte AI is your shortcut to: 

• Quicker deal assessments 
• Standardized insights 
• Secure, governed responses 
• And, yes, smiling analysts (still not kidding) 

See It Live—Without the Dad Jokes (Maybe) 

See how your team can go from CIM overload to AI-powered insight in minutes. Watch this on-demand webinar with me and my colleague, Egnyte solution architect Michael Davis: Faster, Smarter Deal Evaluation: Live Demo of AI-Powered CIM Analysis. 

Or jump straight to the good part: 

Schedule a Personalized Demo to see how this would work for your firm’s processes. 

No more PDF pain. No more compliance drama. Just smarter, faster deal reviews. 

I CIMply can’t wait.