Keye

About Keye Keye (YC F24) is building the world’s smartest private equity analyst. We’re not just accelerating due diligence—we’re helping investors generate alpha. Unlike typical ChatGPT-enhanced tools, Keye is designed specifically for the hard problems in PE diligence. When firms analyze deals through Keye, they tap into a deep library of diligence knowledge and best practices, built from over a decade of real investor experience. Our proprietary analysis engine helps teams quickly identify high-potential deals and move faster on the ones that matter. We’re a team of investors and engineers with backgrounds at Vista Equity Partners, Permira, Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, Tesla and multiple startups. Our founding team has over 20 years of M&A investing experience, has founded companies before, and has been part of four successful acquisitions as early employees. Keye is revenue-generating and has grown 600% in the last six months (some press about our growth here). We’re backed by top-tier investors including Y Combinator, General Catalyst, Sorenson Capital, and Plug and Play. Launched just four months ago, Keye is already working with 40% of the top 25 PE firms, representing over $1.7 trillion in AUM. Simply put we are a rocket ship. The Role We’re hiring a Founding Strategist – Private Equity to lead the full lifecycle of client engagement—from initial demo to platform activation and expansion. Your goal is to drive product fit with each of our ICP clients. This is a technical role that requires prior experience as an investor in private equity. The position is in-person in New York (relocation support available). You’ll work closely with our CEO, COO, sales, and product teams to lead platform adoption, drive activation, and turn user feedback into meaningful product improvements. You will be the face of Keye to our clients—working with them daily on real data, live deals, and high-stakes diligence. This is a client-first, product-critical, and founder-level role. You’ll own core relationships, build new processes, and help shape the team from the ground up. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________ What You’ll Do Drive customer activation—ensuring firms not only onboard, but fully adopt the platform Own relationships with clients from demo to rollout, often working directly with them on live deal data Run tailored POCs that showcase platform value using real, quantitative diligence processes Build and maintain deep, trusted relationships with senior PE professionals—across business and informal settings Collaborate with product and engineering to prioritize, spec, and ship features that drive usage Turn PE workflows and client feedback into actionable roadmap decisions Help define the future structure of the platform strategy org—spanning engagement, success, and support What We’re Looking For 2–6 years in Private Equity (investing role). Deep experience with analyses carried out during due diligence (beyond just commercial DD) Confident presenter with experience engaging senior stakeholders Entrepreneurial, process-driven, with strong product sense and ability to work across teams Works with urgency, clarity, and a strong sense of ownership Socially confident—comfortable leading client sessions, dinners, and events Based in NYC or open to relocating Comfortable in high-pressure, fast-paced environments with tight deadlines and demanding clients Why Now Lead and define a core function at a breakout AI startup Work closely with the founding team to shape strategy and product Build and lead a future team of platform strategists, engagement managers, and sales engineers Own relationships with top-tier PE firms at the forefront of digital transformation Be part of a generational shift in how PE firms use technology You’ll be joining a passionate, high-energy team that’s relentless about building something industry-defining. If you’re looking to leave investi

Who we are Keye is building the diligence layer private equity has always needed and never had. Today it does the work of an analyst, at the bar of an investment committee, on the clock of a two-week deal — 80% of the work in under five minutes, against a process that otherwise takes weeks. Firms use it to kill bad deals earlier and save millions in third-party diligence costs. Tomorrow it watches the deal after you sign. Benchmarks it against every comp in the market. Alerts you before the thesis breaks. Not a faster analyst. A second brain with a hundred years of scars and a live pulse on every industry it touches — built by a team that's been on the other side of the table. Four acquisitions as early employees. Twenty-plus years in M&A investing. Engineers out of Tesla, Goldman, Vista, and McKinsey, with technical DNA from AI robotics, drug discovery, and ecommerce. Top-10 PE funds already run diligence on Keye. $1.4T+ in AUM on the platform. 600% growth in six months. Backed by Sorenson Capital, General Catalyst, and Y Combinator. What you’ll do: You'll build the AI systems top PE funds run live deals on. Ingestion that structures chaotic data rooms. Agents that run deterministic analysis on top. Review surfaces that make model output trustworthy enough for an investment committee. Evals, retrieval, tool use, orchestration — held to the bar of a real deal clock. You'd be joining a tight engineering team where everyone is load-bearing. One week you'd be heads-down on architecture — the systems that turn raw deal files into investor-ready outputs at 100% accuracy. Another week you'd be prototyping an agent harness nobody's built before. Another week you'd be cleaning up something fragile because a top-10 PE fund is running a deal on it tomorrow morning. Ownership here is rotating, not absent. At any given time you'll be the person accountable for some load-bearing piece — a system, a migration, a fix — and you'll hand it off or expand it as priorities shift. You'll sit in on planning, align on sequencing, and have weight in what the next two weeks look like. Every shortcut compounds. Every good abstraction compounds harder. Customer obsession matters — their timelines, their standards, their refusal to accept 99%. The work is downstream of that pressure. You'll build things that have to meet it. Example duties Deepen the agent layer. We view the agent as a first class citizen. Not a demo. This means harnesses, planning, subagents, compaction, tool-use design — the primitives that decide whether the system scales with complexity or collapses under it. This will require iteration, decisiveness, and staying abreast on frontier updates.The faster this layer moves, the faster the product gets sharper. Own the deterministic core. Our computation and fact gathering allows any consumer to pull any intermediate artifact from a deal, compose real analytical logic on top, and return a number an IC would defend. Build evals that actually catch regressions before customers do. Not vibes. Real test harnesses for agent output, extraction accuracy, and analysis correctness. Harden the ingestion layer so it handles data rooms with unknown schemas, malformed files, and edge cases that only show up in real deals. Own the infrastructure that keeps the platform fast under real load. Concurrency, queueing, caching, cost — the systems work that decides whether we can run ten deals in parallel or ten thousand. Location: Hybrid or Remote (North America). What we're looking for: You think in systems and ship in days. You know when to build the abstraction and when to skip it. You've succeeded at something hard and can point to it. A company you started. A team you led. A product people used. A bar you cleared that most didn't. You've built and operated production systems that broke, and you fixed them. Not prototypes. Not side projects. Real consequences. Broad across the stack. No layer is someone else's problem. Languages/tools: Python/React sho