Verified against Perplexity Pro · 2026-08-01
Run a structured due-diligence brief on a company across fixed categories, not a vague overview
A category-by-category due diligence brief covering corporate basics, leadership, financial signals, legal risk, and reputation, with explicit "should verify independently" flags on single-sourced claims and a weighting rule tied to why the brief is being run.
The prompt
Ready to copy — highlighted parts are example details you can swap.
Run a due diligence brief on this company. This is being used for evaluating them as a data-processing vendor before a contract signature, so weight what you surface accordingly — a brief for a vendor decision and one for an investment decision should not look identical, since they're screening for different risks entirely. COMPANY Meridian Cloud Systems Inc. JURISDICTION / MARKET Incorporated in Delaware, primary operations in the US and UK SPECIFIC AREAS TO PRIORITIZE Their data-handling and breach history specifically, since this is for a data-processing agreement. CATEGORIES (cover every one — say "nothing significant found" rather than skipping a category silently, since a skipped category and a genuinely clean category should never look identical in the final output) 1. Corporate basics — legal entity, ownership structure, founding date, headquarters, size (employees/revenue if disclosed). 2. Leadership — key executives, notable prior roles, any recent leadership departures and, if reported, why. 3. Financial signals — funding history, public financials if applicable, credit or rating signals, anything suggesting financial distress or unusual instability. 4. Legal and regulatory — active litigation, regulatory actions, sanctions, or significant past settlements, with dates and current status (resolved vs. ongoing). 5. Reputation and recent news — the last 6-12 months of coverage, separating substantive news (a real operational or legal development) from routine PR (a funding announcement, an award, a partnership press release with no independent verification). 6. Red flags — anything that appears in only one outlet, is disputed by the company, or you could not independently verify — mark this "should verify independently," not as settled fact, and say specifically what verification step would resolve it. WEIGHTING BY PURPOSE Given the stated diligence purpose, name which one or two categories above matter most for this specific decision, and make sure those get the deepest coverage rather than treating all six categories as equally important by default. Do not synthesize a cleaner story than the sourcing actually supports — if two sources disagree on a material fact, present both explicitly and say so, rather than picking the version that makes for a tidier narrative.
Customize
Optional — swap in your own details for the highlighted parts above.
Why this works
Partitioning the brief into fixed named categories — corporate basics, leadership, financial signals, legal and regulatory, reputation, red flags — forces coverage of areas a narrower 'tell me about this company' would not reliably surface, the same mechanic behind a structured code-review rubric: closed categories with a required verdict per category prevent silent gaps, since skipping one is visibly different from filling it with 'nothing significant found.' For a task that benefits from browsing several distinct source types directly, such as an investor-relations page, a court records search, and a company's own careers or leadership page, running this through Perplexity Comet's agentic browsing lets the same brief navigate to each of those pages directly rather than relying only on what a search index has already crawled, which matters for source types — like a specific court docket or a leadership page's own bio text — that don't always surface cleanly through a standard web search even when they exist and are current. The weighting-by-purpose step exists because a fixed six-category structure, applied identically regardless of why the brief was requested, wastes depth on categories that don't matter for the actual decision at hand — a vendor screen genuinely cares less about founder biography than an investment screen does, and naming that up front tells the model where to actually spend its research effort rather than distributing it evenly by default. The explicit 'should verify independently' flag on single-sourced claims keeps the synthesis honest about its own confidence level — a due diligence brief that reads as uniformly certain is more dangerous than one that visibly marks its own weak points, because the reader has no way to tell where the actual risk in relying on the brief sits.
Verified against
Perplexity Pro Sonar Pro · 2026-08-01
Perplexity Comet 2026 browser agent · 2026-08-02
Changelog
- 2026-08-02 — Initial publish, verified against Perplexity Pro Sonar Pro and Perplexity Comet.
Need this built into your business?
If a prompt isn't enough — what Scult builds, built and maintained for you — that's Scult's day job.
EXPLORE WHAT SCULT BUILDS
