How Metal Learns From Your Deal History

Every deal your firm has touched — whether it closed, stalled, or passed — is a data point. Metal turns that history into two reusable assets that make every new opportunity easier to evaluate: Deal Profiles and Deal Intelligence.

This article explains what they are, how they show up in the product, and how they compound as your firm does more work.

The two building blocks

Deal Intelligence

Deal Intelligence is a structured snapshot of what you knew, decided, and concluded about a single deal. For each deal Metal captures:

• Sector and sub-sector — the market the target operates in.

• Size band — the scale of the opportunity (EBITDA, revenue, or enterprise value, whichever is most natural for that sector).

• Key financial metrics — the numbers the deal was evaluated on.

• Timeline — when the deal started and, if applicable, when it closed.

• Investment thesis — the reason the deal was pursued.

• Key decisions — the pivotal calls made along the way and the reasoning behind them.

• Outcome — won, lost, or passed, with context on why.

• Macro context — the market conditions at the time.

Deal Intelligence is built from the materials that already live in the deal: CIMs, memos, model outputs, notes, and supporting documents. It is a single, searchable record per deal.

Deal Profiles

A Deal Profile is what you get when Metal groups Deal Intelligence across many deals that share a common characteristic — typically a sector, a sub-sector, or a size band. Each profile contains:

• The set of deals that fall into that bucket.

• The financial metrics that matter most for that group.

• A synthesized view of the typical thesis, the most common outcomes, and the patterns your firm has seen when playing in that space.

Profiles get sharper as more deals accumulate. A firm with 50 logistics deals has a much more reliable "logistics profile" than a firm with three.

How Deal Profiles and Intelligence show up in the product

Profiles and Intelligence are not a standalone view — they power features you already use.

Similar Deals on every deal page

When you open a deal, Metal surfaces the deals in your history that most closely resemble it — same sector, same sub-sector, comparable size, similar financial profile. Each entry carries a short explanation of why it was chosen: shared sector, shared sub-sector, similar revenue scale, comparable EBITDA band, matching vintage, same outcome type. That context lets you jump straight to the deals worth re-reading.

Faster sector and sub-sector context

When you start work on a new deal in a sector you've seen before, Metal can apply the sector's profile to frame the opportunity: which metrics your firm tracks for this space, what "typical" looks like, and which past deals are worth comparing against.

Smarter research and memos

Metal's research agents use profiles to anchor their work. When drafting screening notes, CIM summaries, or IC memos, the agents reference the patterns your firm has already established — not a generic industry playbook.

Institutional memory that survives turnover

Because Intelligence is captured per deal and profiles aggregate across deals, the knowledge persists even as team composition changes. A new analyst can read a sub-sector profile and be productive immediately.

Why this benefits a private equity firm

Faster screening. Instead of re-reading ten past deals to decide whether a new opportunity is interesting, you see the comparable set on the deal page, with the matching logic already surfaced.

Consistent evaluation. When the same metrics and framings are applied across every deal in a sector, comparisons are apples-to-apples and patterns become visible.

Compounding knowledge. Every deal adds to the record. Profiles you touch rarely still sharpen automatically as adjacent work flows through the platform.

Less knowledge drain. Investment decisions, thesis notes, and lessons learned are tied to the deal record — not locked in a partner's inbox or an analyst's model.

Evidence-based decisions. When an IC asks "have we seen this before?", the answer is a list of specific deals with the reasoning behind each match, not a gut check.

What you need to do

Nothing special. Keep working deals in Metal the way you already do — upload materials, capture notes, track status, record outcomes. Deal Intelligence is extracted from that work, and profiles are built from the accumulated Intelligence. The more your firm operates in Metal, the more valuable the profiles become.