Data room
A secure, organised folder of documents a company shares with investors or buyers during due diligence.
What it is
A data room holds the documents an investor or acquirer needs to evaluate a deal. Today it is almost always virtual: a shared workspace with permissions, access logs, and a fixed folder structure.
Startups open one when they raise. Companies being acquired open a much larger one for the buyer’s diligence team.
What goes in one
- Corporate. Incorporation documents, cap table, and board minutes.
- Financial. Accounts, forecasts, and key metrics.
- Commercial. Customer contracts, pipeline, and pricing structure.
- Legal. IP, employment agreements, and any open disputes.
- Product. Roadmap, architecture, and security documentation.
Where it connects to the CRM
The data room is not the CRM, and it should not try to be. The CRM records that the data room exists, who has access, and where the deal stands.
In Attio, that is usually a link attribute on the deal record plus a pipeline stage such as Diligence. Moving a deal into that stage can trigger a workflow that creates diligence tasks and assigns an owner.
Why it matters
Diligence is where deals stall. When the deal record shows what has been received, what is outstanding, and who is reviewing it, the team spends less time asking each other for status.
On this site