Because here is how the typical mid-market DD process runs in 2026.
The buyer's advisor builds the request list in Word or Excel. They send it to the seller's advisor by email. The seller's advisor forwards parts of it internally, sometimes to people who do not know they have been forwarded anything. Documents trickle back. Some go into the data room. Some get emailed directly to the buyer. Some get sent by WeTransfer because the file is too big. A few never arrive at all, and nobody notices until week four of the six-week timeline.
In parallel, clarifications happen in three places at once. A Q&A thread inside the VDR. Email between advisors. Phone calls that get summarised, badly, in follow-up emails.
DealRoom's own diagnosis, written by founder and former M&A advisor Kison Patel, makes the same point: traditional due diligence is completed across various tools, using a virtual data room to store all documents, Excel trackers for listing requests and tracking progress, and one-off emails for back-and-forth deal-specific communication. The result is version control problems, miscommunication, duplicate work, and information silos.
That is the polite version. The honest version is that deals lose between one and three weeks of avoidable time inside this exact gap.
What the slowdown actually costs
A typical mid-market deal runs a six-week diligence window, 30 to 45 business days from LOI to closing decision. DealRoom's data from 200+ deals shows that adopting structured DD coordination reduces that window by roughly 50%.
Even a conservative read of that number, say 20% time savings, has hard financial implications. Deals that drag past their LOI exclusivity window are more likely to fall apart. Buyers find new concerns. Sellers entertain other approaches. Financing terms expire. The diligence team's billable hours stack up at $400 to $800 per hour while everyone waits for the same three financial statements to be reuploaded in the correct format.
TE Connectivity, cited in the 2025 Diligent M&A report, cut its DD processing time by 25% within six months of adopting structured bi-weekly progress reporting. That is just from improving visibility. The actual structural fix, moving the requests themselves out of email, sits one step further down.
Why email keeps winning even when everyone hates it
Every deal team I have spoken to knows email is the wrong tool for DD coordination. Every one of them still uses it.
Three reasons keep coming up.
First, the client does not have a VDR account or finds it slow to use, so they default to replying with attachments. The deal team forwards those attachments into the data room manually, often a day or two late. The Q&A trail in the data room and the email trail diverge.
Second, the deal lifecycle includes participants who never get VDR access, like co-investors doing parallel commercial DD, or insurance brokers running a W&I process. These people communicate by email by definition. Their inputs do not flow back into the central system.
Third, and this is the biggest one, the VDR is a storage tool. It was not built to be a coordination tool. It does not understand which request a document fulfils, who owes the next response, or what is overdue. Excel does that work. Email does that work. Both badly.
The result is what every senior deal lead has lived through. Closing week arrives and someone discovers that an item from the original request list never came in. It was discussed once in a thread, marked we will send shortly, and then forgotten. Now there is a fire drill at 11 PM on a Thursday because nobody has clean visibility into what is still open.
The structural fix is not another data room
There is no shortage of VDRs in the M&A market. Adding a better one does not solve the coordination problem because the coordination problem is not about storage. It is about the connective tissue between the request, the response, the document, the reviewer, and the status.
This is the gap Alkmist closes. Every DD request lives as a structured task with an owner on the buyer side, an owner on the seller side, a deadline, and acceptance criteria. The buyer's lead advisor sees, at a glance, what is outstanding across all 174 items, who is responsible, and what is on track. The seller's advisor sees the same view from their side. Clarifications happen against the specific request, not in a parallel inbox.
The Alkmist Inbox Agent bridges the email problem directly. When the seller's CFO emails the buyer's analyst with the audited 2023 financials attached, the agent recognises which request that fulfils, files the document against the task, updates the status, and notifies the analyst. The email never has to be manually translated into a task update. The data room and the request list stay in sync.
For deals running across multiple advisors (a buy-side M&A team, a commercial DD provider, a legal team, a tax advisor, a W&I broker), this matters more than usual. Each party is doing their own coordination work today, in their own tools. Alkmist gives them a shared layer to work through, with permission controls that respect the Chinese wall structure of a sell-side process.
We are running this with M&A advisors across Belgium, the Netherlands, and the UK right now, on deals ranging from EUR 5M to EUR 150M enterprise value. The pattern is consistent. The DD window holds tighter. The closing week is quieter. The post-close debrief no longer starts with we should have caught that earlier.
If your last deal slipped its LOI window by a week or two, the cause was probably not the work itself. It was almost certainly the system around the work.
Sources: Bloomberg Law M&A Due Diligence Checklist 2025; DealRoom benchmark data (200+ middle-market deals); DealRoom Due Diligence Process Guide 2026; Diligent M&A Report 2025 (TE Connectivity case); Smartmerger.com DD Request Best Practices 2025; Microsoft Work Trend Index 2025 (interruption data); McKinsey Global Institute email research.
