How to Do Due Diligence on a Business Before Buying

Due diligence means verification, not trust. Before you invest, acquire, partner, or make a large purchase, you need independent checks against real records—not what the counterparty tells you. Here's the manual path and how Cortex automates it with code-verified evidence.

The Real Steps for Due Diligence

Start with the basics: verify the company's legal registration in its jurisdiction. Check the business registry for status, directors, and filing history. Next, pull financial statements from official filings (e.g., SEC for US public companies, or local equivalents for private ones). Look for red flags like late filings, auditor changes, or unusual related-party transactions.

Then dig into domain history: use WHOIS and archive tools to see how long the domain has been active, ownership changes, and any past association with spam or scams. Search for litigation records, regulatory actions, and customer reviews on independent platforms. Cross-reference news articles for negative press. This manual process is fragmented and slow—and easy to miss something.

Why ChatGPT Is Dangerous for Due Diligence

Asking ChatGPT to summarize a company sounds convenient, but it's a trap. ChatGPT answers from old memory, sounds confident, and can fabricate sources and citations. It cannot open a live registry or verify a current filing. When you need proof, a confident-sounding hallucination is worse than no answer.

Paid 'Verified' badges and curated reviews are also unreliable. They are self-reported or gamed. Independent code-checked evidence beats both.

How Cortex Does This – Code Is the Judge, Not the Model

Cortex is not an LLM judge. It runs each checkable claim against real sources: company registries, SEC filings, domain history, litigation databases, review aggregators, and news archives. Python code assigns a status to each claim: VERIFIED, PARTIALLY_VERIFIED, UNVERIFIED, or CONTRADICTED. Any number without source proof is deleted—anti-fabrication by design.

The output is a GO / NO-GO verdict with a per-claim evidence trail. The same input always gives the same verdict, because code—not a model's mood—sets it. No fluff, no hype, just evidence.

What You Get with Cortex

• Automated verification of legal registration, financial filings, domain history, litigation, reviews, and news.
• Each claim stamped with VERIFIED / PARTIALLY_VERIFIED / UNVERIFIED / CONTRADICTED.
• All unproven numbers deleted—no fabricated stats.
• A clear GO / NO-GO recommendation with the evidence trail.

Manual vs. Automated: The Time Cost

Manual due diligence can take days or weeks, depending on the number of sources and jurisdictions. You have to visit each registry, parse filings, and cross-check manually. Cortex does it in minutes, with code that never skips a step.

Start Your Due Diligence with Certainty

Don't rely on memory or paid badges. Use Cortex to get independent, code-verified evidence on any company. Enter a name or URL and receive a structured report with per-claim verification and a GO / NO-GO verdict.

Frequently asked questions