This is Part 2 of our series on documentary intelligence in private markets.
Read Part 1: Documents: The Willy Wonka Golden Ticket to Private Markets Due Diligence
Private markets professionals navigate complexity that compounds across sectors: each segment within private markets, whether it is infrastructure, real estate, natural resources, or technology, operates with its own distinct documentary framework. While Part 1 established that private markets fundamentally differ from public markets, the greater challenge emerges when you realize these sectors differ dramatically from each other. Each has evolved unique document types, analytical requirements, and contextual frameworks that resist standardized approaches and demand sector-specific expertise.
The document-centric reality of private markets becomes exponentially more complex when you consider that each sector presents distinct challenges that resist templated solutions. Understanding what to look for and where to find it requires domain-specific expertise, flexible parsing methodologies, and deep contextual reasoning.
Consider the distinct and varied documents that investment professionals must analyze while conducting diligence in these sectors:
Infrastructure involves reviewing multi-decade concession agreements with embedded performance benchmarks, analyzing technical engineering studies tied to asset operability, and navigating regulatory filings across multiple jurisdictions. Documents often include bespoke provisions on usage caps, demand guarantees, and escalation mechanisms that materially alter project economics. A single regulatory change buried in hundreds of pages can shift IRR projections by several percentage points.
Real Estate diligence often involves parsing lease rolls with hundreds of tenants or analyzing infrastructure leases like cell towers across multiple states—each with distinct regulations, expiries, and escalation clauses. Add in environmental reviews, property condition reports, and complex lease terms like CAM reconciliations or tenant improvement allowances, and valuation quickly hinges on buried details. Whether leases are gross or net can significantly impact net operating income assumptions.
Natural Resources & Energy requires detailed review of mineral rights leases, joint operating agreements, and production-sharing contracts. Surface use agreements, royalty structures, and depletion schedules interact with environmental liabilities and reclamation obligations to affect both asset value and exit optionality. A single "change of control" provision in a drilling partnership can trigger costly renegotiations post-acquisition.
Technology & IP-Driven Businesses hinges on licensing agreements, data processing addenda, and patent filings. A single exclusivity clause or "most favored nation" term can impair scalability assumptions. Change-of-control provisions in SaaS contracts or residual IP rights post-termination often hide in appendices and redlines, yet can represent the difference between a platform acquisition and a subscale purchase.
Healthcare Services centers around provider agreements, payer reimbursement schedules, and medical licensure filings. Material differences in fee-for-service vs. value-based care contracts, along with exposure to Medicare/Medicaid audit clauses, introduce unique compliance and revenue-recognition risks.
Each document tells part of the business story, but the real insight comes from understanding how they interconnect within the context of sector-specific deal dynamics.
The traditional approach forces firms into a difficult choice: conduct thorough diligence that might take weeks or months and risk losing deals to faster competitors, or move quickly and risk missing critical details that emerge only through deep document analysis.
This trade-off becomes more acute when you consider that the most material insights often hide not in individual documents, but in the interactions between them. How does a change-of-control provision in a key customer contract interact with debt covenant restrictions? What happens when mineral rights expire during the hold period while environmental reclamation obligations remain? These cross-document dependencies represent exactly the kind of complex pattern recognition where even highly skilled teams find themselves constrained by traditional manual processes and time pressures.
Sophisticated private markets professionals, who excel at seeing patterns and connections in businesses, often find themselves working with tools and frameworks that weren't designed for deals that routinely generate massive amounts of information spread across hundreds of documents—structured data, unstructured text, and varied document types—each containing potential deal-altering details that interact in unpredictable ways.
This document-centric complexity is precisely why private markets can't simply adopt public markets data architecture or rely on standardized extraction frameworks. The solution requires understanding that documents are interconnected intelligence networks that demand specialized, context-aware approaches capable of processing both scale and nuance.
Private markets professionals possess exceptional judgment, intelligence and sector-specific expertise. What they've lacked until now are tools designed specifically for their decision-making process. Most deal teams rely on frameworks, tools, and institutional knowledge developed for different contexts or adapted for use from different types of markets. This in effect is a constraint on their creativity because it forces them to adapt generic solutions to highly specialized challenges.
The firms that deploy platforms built specifically for the complexity of private markets deal making will unlock what may become the most valuable capability in the industry: the ability to synthesize insights across sector-specific documentation while maintaining the deep contextual reasoning that drives superior investment decisions. In an era of nearly unlimited data, AI platforms like ToltIQ are playing an increasingly important role in helping professionals parse through this sea of data to validate what's important and can create competitive advantage.
© 2025 ToltIQ
