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Due diligence after the term sheet

Pre-investment due diligence is thorough. You review financials, contracts, cap tables, customer data, projections. You hire advisors and build models. You spend six weeks getting comfortable.

Then you wire the money, and your financial visibility drops to whatever the founder decides to share.

We are building Moonlight to fill that post-investment gap. The product is in active development, and not every piece of the monitoring story is finished, but the shape is already useful enough that pilot investors and operators are running it on real portfolios.

Post-investment monitoring is a gap, not a feature​

Most investors treat this gap as the cost of doing business. Board meetings happen quarterly. Financial reports arrive late and summarised. Between meetings, you are working with old information.

This is a tooling problem more than a behaviour problem. The systems that run a company's finances (QuickBooks, bank accounts, expense tools) are built for the operator. There is no investor-facing layer that exposes verified financial data in real time.

So you compensate with process: monthly check-ins, quarterly reports, annual audits. All of that is retrospective and filtered through the founder's lens.

What post-investment visibility looks like​

Moonlight is being shaped to provide that monitoring layer. Four pieces matter most for investors today.

The first is live data. Every income and expense entry shows up in the workspace as soon as it is recorded. You no longer wait for the founder to remember an update or for the accountant to finish the close.

The second is project-level granularity. You invested in the company, but your thesis was likely about a specific product line or market. Filter by project and you see how that bet is performing. Revenue, expenses and net by month, without asking anyone.

The third is a document trail. Every entry can carry invoices, payment confirmations, receipts and contracts. When an expense looks unusual, you click and see the invoice. The completeness model tells you, at a glance, whether the supporting docs are present.

The fourth is accountant verification. Entries pass through a review workflow before they sync to the books. The accountant approves, rejects or requests changes. By the time data lands in the reports, a person has looked at it.

Where this matters in practice​

A portfolio company's flagship project is profitable, but a side project the founder kicked off six months ago is losing $40K a month. The company is still cash-flow positive, so it never makes the quarterly summary. With project-level reports, the side project's burn is visible from the first month.

One contractor receives 35% of total company spend across three projects. If they disappear, operations stall. The party-level Sankey view in Moonlight surfaces that concentration in seconds.

A company reports $200K in Q3 expenses. You drill into the entries and find that 30% have no supporting documents. Either the finance process is loose or those expenses cannot be verified. Either way, the completeness model surfaces it without forcing a manual audit.

The founder's quarterly deck says "marketing spend is under control." The data shows marketing-tagged expenses grew 60% quarter on quarter. Both statements can be true depending on framing. Seeing the raw numbers next to the narrative makes for better conversations.

This is not about distrust​

Investors who monitor actively are not micromanagers. They are informed capital.

Founders who make their data accessible are not giving up control. They are removing a reporting burden and building investor confidence in the same move.

The relationships that work best have low information asymmetry. We are not trying to get there by adding more meetings or reports. The goal is to keep the financial data accessible to both sides at all times.

The cost of not monitoring​

Every year there is a story about a portfolio company that overstated revenue for two years before anyone noticed. The quarterly reports looked fine. Board presentations were polished. The numbers were wrong.

You do not need to assume your founders are dishonest. You need a portfolio practice where verified financial data is the default state, not a special request.

How it works in practice​

  1. The portfolio company sets up a workspace in Moonlight.
  2. The finance team records entries, attaches documents and links the accounting system.
  3. The accountant reviews and approves entries.
  4. You get read-only access to the workspace.
  5. You open reports, entries, documents and completeness scores whenever you want to look.

There is nothing to integrate on your side. You look at the same system the company already uses to run its finances. As the product matures, the team will be adding portfolio-level rollups, alerting and a few investor-specific views; for now, the per-workspace experience is what is exercised in pilot setups.