From Portfolio Monitoring to Portfolio Intelligence: iLEVEL Launches AI Search

While private equity firms sit on record levels of dry powder, their existing portfolios remain in a prolonged holding pattern. With deal flow at multi-year lows and exit windows firmly shut, the difference between winners and losers increasingly comes down to one thing: how well firms understand what they already own. Investors extracting alpha from this stagnant market aren't just monitoring their portfolios—they're actively managing them to create value.

A new capability in iLEVEL will help asset allocators and managers navigate these macro-economic realities and transform the way they explore and understand the factors that shape portfolio performance. We have launched iLEVEL Document Search, a new AI-powered search capability for extracting intelligence from the myriad of investment documents, decks, and memos held in iLEVEL.

Exploring the "unknown unknowns"

iLEVEL Document Search allows clients to use natural language to query all of the documents they have stored on the platform. Users can now ask open-ended questions of materials such as board decks, quarterly financials, annual financials, and fund financials that are being received and stored within their iLEVEL Document Library. This type of search can help users interrogate assumptions, broaden the focus and uncover opportunities or unexpected developments that would otherwise never come to light.

For example, an asset manager can now query iLEVEL to find out which portfolio companies are impacted by tariffs, what level of concentration the portfolio has in a specific industry, or what their geographic or currency exposure profile looks like. Similarly, an asset allocator might conduct sentiment analysis across their managers to gain an aggregate view of the market. Free from the confines of a template or a pivot table, the possibilities for insight are endless.

Democratized access to insight

Until now, the ability to generate reports in iLEVEL has largely remained in the hands of power users. Our new AI-powered search capability eliminates this operational bottleneck by allowing anyone, including members of the deal team, to directly query portfolio data and documents using intuitive natural language. The answers to any question are now available on demand to users of any experience level in the organization, which encourages ongoing, ad hoc exploration and analysis.

Rigorous validation and control

In private markets, the auditability and confidentiality of data is non-negotiable. iLEVEL Document Search includes two unique features that support these industry priorities.

Annotations. Natural language search results are annotated granularly to attribute and link every data point and statement to an original source. This allows users to see the information in context with one click and feel confident that the answers they receive are accurate, credible and traceable.

Permissions. The results returned by each user's search are limited to the documents and data they have permission to view: if a particular portfolio company or report is off limits to a particular user, that information is excluded from their search results. This approach delivers a seamless search experience    while ensuring that sensitive materials remain confidential.

A search-first approach

AI search is part of a broader movement towards making a wider array of financial data accessible and searchable for the private market participants who use iLEVEL.

Last year, we released Peer Comparables, a module that integrates financials and estimates data from S&P Capital IQ Pro into iLEVEL, streamlining performance benchmarking by empowering users to see public company fundamental data side by side with their proprietary alternative investment data.

Earlier this year, we launched Capital Structure Analysis, which helps firms digitize and visualize a borrower's capital structure to gain insight into the past, present and future performance of their private credit portfolio.

Going forward, AI will remain central to the iLEVEL product roadmap, headlined by our ongoing investment in Automated Data Ingestion, iLEVEL’s solution for facilitating the data collection process. Additional capabilities, including a new metric calculator, enhancements to automatically match even more extracted data items, and email-powered collection workflows, are all set to launch by year end.

And coming up next on our roadmap is an AI-powered alert system that continuously scans portfolios and generates alerts whenever it uncovers patterns of interest or concern.

The era of limitless intelligence

iLEVEL has an unmatched reputation for data ingestion, consolidation, normalization and reporting in the private markets. Now, we are focusing on better ways of leveraging that data to generate deeper, timelier, more contextual insights into the portfolio that can deliver a competitive edge.