DealDesk is the app private equity firms use to manage AI analysts for deal sourcing.

Open-source orchestration for teams of AI analysts working a thesis.

If your associate is an employee, DealDesk is the deal team.

Inspired by Paperclip, DealDesk is a Node.js server and React UI that orchestrates a team of AI analysts to source acquisition targets. Bring your own agents, define an investment thesis, and track sourced targets, intermediary coverage, and outreach from one dashboard.

It looks like a deal pipeline. Under the hood: investment theses, target tracking, intermediary maps, contact enrichment, outreach drafting, governance, and analyst coordination.

Manage investment theses, not spreadsheets.

| | Step | Example | | ------ | -------------------- | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | 01 | Define the thesis | "HVAC roll-up — Southeast US, $5–25M revenue, founder-owned, 15%+ EBITDA margins." | | 02 | Hire the deal team | Sector Sourcer, Intermediary Coverage Analyst, Contact Enricher, Outreach Drafter. | | 03 | Approve and run | Review targets. Set budgets. Hit go. Monitor the pipeline from the dashboard. |

DealDesk is right for you if

• ✅ You run a private equity firm, search fund, or family office doing thesis-driven sourcing
• ✅ You want to coordinate many AI analysts (Claude, Codex, Cursor, custom) toward a sector thesis
• ✅ You want analysts running autonomously 24/7 screening targets, but still want partner review before outreach
• ✅ You want to monitor costs per analyst and enforce monthly budgets
• ✅ You want a process that feels like a deal pipeline, not a folder of scripts

Features

Why DealDesk is special

DealDesk handles the hard orchestration details correctly.

| | | | -------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | | Atomic execution. | Target checkout and budget enforcement are atomic, so no double-research and no runaway spend. | | Persistent analyst state. | Analysts resume the same target context across heartbeats instead of re-screening from scratch. | | PE-native data model. | Thesis, target, intermediary, owner, CEO, contact, outreach draft, pipeline stage, partner review — first-class entities. | | Structured fields over prose. | Targets, contacts, and intermediaries are structured records, not memo blobs. Filterable, exportable, syncable. | | Governance with rollback. | Approval gates are enforced on outreach sends; config changes are revisioned; bad changes can be rolled back safely. | | Thesis-aware execution. | Every target carries full thesis ancestry so analysts consistently see the screen criteria, not just a company name. | | True multi-fund isolation. | Every entity is company-scoped, so one deployment can run many funds or strategies with separate data and audit trails. |

What's under the hood

DealDesk is a full deal-sourcing control plane, not a thin wrapper.

┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                      DEALDESK SERVER                         │
│                                                              │
│  ┌───────────┐  ┌───────────┐  ┌───────────┐  ┌───────────┐  │
│  │  Thesis & │  │  Targets  │  │ Heartbeat │  │Governance │  │
│  │  Strategy │  │ & Pipeline│  │ Execution │  │& Approvals│  │
│  └───────────┘  └───────────┘  └───────────┘  └───────────┘  │
│                                                              │
│  ┌───────────┐  ┌───────────┐  ┌───────────┐  ┌───────────┐  │
│  │ Deal Team │  │Intermediary  │ Contact   │  │  Budget   │  │
│  │ & Roles   │  │  Coverage │  │Enrichment │  │ & Costs   │  │
│  └───────────┘  └───────────┘  └───────────┘  └───────────┘  │
│                                                              │
│  ┌───────────┐  ┌───────────┐  ┌───────────┐  ┌───────────┐  │
│  │  Outreach │  │ Secrets & │  │ Activity  │  │  Fund     │  │
│  │  Drafts   │  │  Storage  │  │ & Audit   │  │Portability│  │
│  └───────────┘  └───────────┘  └───────────┘  └───────────┘  │
└──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
         ▲              ▲              ▲              ▲
   ┌─────┴─────┐  ┌─────┴─────┐  ┌─────┴─────┐  ┌─────┴─────┐
   │  Claude   │  │   Codex   │  │   CLI     │  │ HTTP/web  │
   │   Code    │  │           │  │  agents   │  │   bots    │
   └───────────┘  └───────────┘  └───────────┘  └───────────┘

The systems

Thesis & Strategy — Investment theses are first-class records: sector, geography, revenue band, margin band, ownership profile, and exclusions. Every target, outreach, and analyst run carries the thesis it serves.

Deal Team & Roles — Analysts have roles, titles, reporting lines, and budgets. The seeded role templates (Sector Sourcer, Intermediary Coverage Analyst, Contact Enricher, Outreach Drafter, Pipeline Manager) are the starting deal team; Quick Hire adds custom roles in seconds.

Targets & Pipeline — Targets are tickets scoped to a thesis with structured fields (revenue, EBITDA, owner, headquarters, fit score), pipeline stage, comments, work products, and an immutable audit trail. No double-sourcing, no lost context.

Heartbeat Execution — DB-backed wakeup queue with coalescing, budget checks, workspace resolution, secret injection, skill loading, and adapter invocation. Each run produces structured logs, cost events, session state, and audit trails. Orphan recovery is automatic.

Intermediary Coverage — Bankers, brokers, and advisors are first-class records with sector tags, last-touch tracking, active processes, and relationship owners. Coverage analysts keep the map fresh on a heartbeat.

Contact Enrichment — Owner, CEO, and key-person enrichment per target. Structured fields for name, title, email, phone, and source. Dedupe is enforced; warnings surface up to the partner.

Outreach Drafts — Analysts draft personalized intermediary and target outreach. Drafts are queued, reviewed by board actors, and only sent after explicit approval. Gmail OAuth is the default send path.

Governance & Approvals — Outreach approval workflows, execution policies with review stages, decision tracking, budget hard-stops, analyst pause/resume/terminate, and full audit logging. Nothing leaves the firm without your sign-off.

Budget & Cost Control — Token and cost tracking by fund, analyst, thesis, target, provider, and model. Scoped budget policies with warning thresholds and hard stops. Overspend pauses analysts and cancels queued work automatically.

Activity & Audit — Mutating actions, heartbeat state changes, cost events, approvals, comments, and outreach sends are recorded as durable activity so partners can audit what happened and why.

What DealDesk is not

| | | | ---------------------------- | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | Not a CRM. | It syncs to yours — Affinity, DealCloud, HubSpot — rather than replacing it. | | Not an agent runtime. | Bring your own (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, OpenClaw, HTTP). DealDesk orchestrates the team they work on. | | Not a data provider. | Connect your own enrichment (Apollo, Hunter, ZoomInfo, web search). DealDesk routes the calls and tracks the cost. | | Not a chat interface. | Analysts work through structured tickets, not chat windows. The pipeline is the product. | | Not a workflow builder. | No drag-and-drop pipelines. DealDesk models a PE sourcing org — with theses, targets, intermediaries, budgets, and governance. | | Not a single-analyst tool. | This is for teams. If you have one analyst, you probably don't need DealDesk. If you have a sector sweep going — you do. |

Quickstart

Open source. Self-hosted. No DealDesk account required.

npx dealdesk@latest onboard

Then open http://localhost:3100.

Rerunning onboard keeps existing config in place. Use dealdesk configure to edit settings.

Or manually:

git clone https://github.com/JackJanoian/deal-desk.git
cd deal-desk
pnpm install
pnpm dev

This starts the API server at http://localhost:3100. An embedded PostgreSQL database is created automatically — no setup required.

Requirements: Node.js 20+, pnpm 9.15+

FAQ

What does a typical setup look like? Locally, a single Node.js process manages an embedded Postgres and local file storage. For production, point it at your own Postgres and deploy however you like. Define your thesis, hire analysts from the role templates (or build your own), and the team takes over.

Can I run multiple funds or strategies? Yes. A single deployment can run an unlimited number of funds with complete data isolation. Useful if you run multiple theses, a fund-of-one, or a search fund umbrella.

How is DealDesk different from Claude Code or Codex on their own? DealDesk uses those agents. It orchestrates them into a deal team — with theses, intermediary maps, target pipelines, budgets, and governance. Claude Code researches a company; DealDesk runs the screen.

Do analysts run continuously? By default, analysts run on scheduled heartbeats and event-based triggers (new target, partner review request). You can also wire in continuous agents. You bring the agent; DealDesk coordinates the work.

Does DealDesk replace my CRM? No. DealDesk is the upstream sourcing layer. Push qualified targets into Affinity, DealCloud, or HubSpot when they're ready for the IC.

Development

pnpm dev              # Full dev (API + UI, watch mode)
pnpm dev:once         # Full dev without file watching
pnpm dev:server       # Server only
pnpm build            # Build all
pnpm typecheck        # Type checking
pnpm test             # Cheap default test run (Vitest only)
pnpm test:watch       # Vitest watch mode
pnpm test:e2e         # Playwright browser suite
pnpm db:generate      # Generate DB migration
pnpm db:migrate       # Apply migrations

pnpm test does not run Playwright. Browser suites stay separate and are typically run only when working on those flows or in CI.

See doc/DEVELOPING.md for the full development guide.

Roadmap

• ✅ Investment thesis as a first-class entity
• ✅ Target tracking with structured PE fields
• ✅ Intermediary coverage map
• ✅ Contact / owner / CEO enrichment
• ✅ Outreach drafts with board approval gates
• ✅ Gmail OAuth send path
• ✅ Quick Hire for custom analyst roles
• ✅ Scheduled heartbeats and budgets
• ⚪ CRM sync (Affinity, DealCloud, HubSpot)
• ⚪ LinkedIn Sales Navigator integration

See ROADMAP.md for the full roadmap.

Privacy & telemetry

DealDesk is local-first: your thesis, targets, contacts, intermediaries, and outreach drafts stay in the bundled PostgreSQL database on your machine. Nothing is sent to a central server as part of normal operation.

Anonymous usage telemetry (install / feature counts, no PII, private references hashed) is opt-in and disabled by default. To turn it on:

| Method | How | | -------------------- | ---------------------------------------------------- | | Environment variable | DEALDESK_TELEMETRY_ENABLED=1 | | Config file | Set telemetry.enabled: true in your DealDesk config |

Even when enabled, telemetry is disabled in CI (CI=true) and honors DO_NOT_TRACK=1 and DEALDESK_TELEMETRY_DISABLED=1.

Outbound network calls only happen for integrations you explicitly configure (LLM provider, enrichment provider, Gmail OAuth).

Contributing

We welcome contributions. See the contributing guide for details.

License

MIT © 2026 DealDesk AI. See LICENSE for the full text.

Trademarks and logos are not covered by the MIT License. See TRADEMARK.md.