TL;DR: We’ve just launched document search. Ask the AI Analyst anything about the PDFs you have stored in Standard Metrics. It finds the right files, pulls out the answer, adds context from the rest of your portfolio, and cites the source.

Standard Metrics is upgrading our AI Analyst with document search.

Early this year, we launched our portfolio-wide AI Analyst, an in-app agent that analyzes the portfolio data firms store in Standard Metrics to support workflows like portfolio reviews, ad-hoc analysis, and LP reporting. We’ve updated it along the way with web search, charting functionality, global benchmarks and more. But when we first launched we promised that bringing more unstructured data into the tool was on the roadmap. This launch is a big step toward fulfilling that promise.

Until now, our AI Analyst could work with structured portfolio data and with commentary stored in places like notes and tear sheets. It couldn’t read the board decks, investor updates, and other PDFs stored in a company’s Documents folder. Now it can.

Why we built document search

Important portfolio context often lives in documents rather than in clean data fields: board decks, investor updates, financial reports, investment memos, budgets, forecasts, and agreements. In the past, when investors wanted this context, they had to remember which document the context they were looking for would be in, find the file, download the file, and read the file manually. Across quarters and quarters of multiple portfolio companies’ documents, this search was time-consuming and frustrating.

Customers came to us wanting the AI Analyst to read the PDFs already stored in Standard Metrics, and to better answer the story behind metric changes. Document search helps it do both.

How document search works

Ask a question about your portfolio in natural language. Our AI Analyst works through it by:

• Finding the right documents. It looks through all the PDFs you have stored on platform then narrows down to the relevant company, document name, document type, label, upload date, or information request specified in your query.
• Searching their contents. It semantically searches across PDF pages for passages related to your question, even when the wording doesn’t match exactly.
• Reading specific pages. Once it finds a relevant document, it looks more closely at the pages that matter to get your answer.
• Showing its work. Answers include numbered citations, and both the Sources list and citation popovers show the relevant PDF page numbers used in answering your question. Click a citation or source to open the PDF in an in-app preview, no download needed, or go straight to the file in the company’s Documents tab.
• Keeping answers trustworthy and permissions-aware. For plain metric questions, the data in Standard Metrics stays the source of truth. When a document tells a different story, AI Analyst shows both and flags the mismatch. It only searches documents you already have permission to access. Each file in the Documents tab is labeled Searchable, Indexing, or Not searchable, and AI Analyst tells you when a cited source is no longer available.

For our customers, document search does everything from cutting down on board meeting and portfolio review prep by pulling context from portfolio companies’ latest decks in just one query to investigating performance changes by connecting a dip or jump in a metric to what management said about it. Document search is available today to every Standard Metrics customer with AI Analyst enabled. There’s nothing to turn on and no change to pricing.

To get started, we suggest that customers open the AI Analyst and ask a question that names a portfolio company and a document or asks for qualitative context likely to live in a document. Good starting prompts include:

• “What risks are called out in AirChair’s latest board deck?”
• “What changed between AirChair’s Q4 and Q1 board decks?”
• “According to the latest investor update, what did management say about hiring plans?”
• “Compare AirChair’s reported ARR with the discussion in its latest board deck.”
• “What are the biggest growth opportunities and risks for this company?”

What else we’ve launched: AI Analyst in Slack

And document search isn’t the only update this week. Our AI Analyst is now available in Slack.

Portfolio questions don’t always come up while customers are using the Standard Metrics app. Often they come up in Slack, in the middle of a team discussion or right before a meeting. Until now, getting an answer meant leaving the conversation, opening Standard Metrics, starting an AI Analyst chat, and then bringing the answer back to Slack.

Now investors can send AI Analyst a direct message in Slack and get the answer there. Follow-up questions in the same thread keep the context, so investors don’t have to repeat the company or metric they’re asking about. While our AI Analyst works, it shows live progress updates as it thinks and uses tools and it can also search the web and return source links with publication dates. Access is also permission-aware. To set up, a firm admin must connect their Slack workspace to the tool, and only active firm members whose Slack email matches their Standard Metrics account can use it.

The idea of integrating our AI Analyst directly into Slack started as a hackathon project at our latest offsite. We’re excited to see it turn into a production-grade integration ready for every day use from our customers.

What’s next

These releases cover PDFs — which is where most board decks, investor updates, and financial reports live — and Slack — which is where many VCs work. We’ll keep expanding the formats and workflows AI Analyst can handle and where it can be accessed as we learn how customers use document search.

Already using Standard Metrics? Open our AI Analyst and try one of the prompts above. Not a customer yet? Request a demo below.