Workflow aware AI vendor evaluation
Cut through AI vendor noise.
Decide with confidence.
Mainspan helps private equity operating teams evaluate AI vendors in context, scored against real portfolio company workflows, integration realities, risk, and measurable business impact.
Why now
The problem is not finding AI tools.
It is knowing which ones actually fit.
Operating teams are pulled into AI from every direction: limited partners, boards, portfolio executives, and a flood of vendors. Most pitches never get tested against the real workflow, the existing systems, or the value creation plan. The result is wasted management time and pilots that quietly die.
Who it is for
One relationship. Decisions across the whole portfolio.
A buyer side decision layer for the teams responsible for turning AI from experimentation into EBITDA.
A buyer side analyst for every pitch
Tell us the workflow you want to improve. We handle the incoming AI vendor noise and return ranked, decision ready guidance on what deserves management time and what to ignore.
Pilots tied to real workflows
Evaluations grounded in your systems, the capacity of your team, and your value creation plan, not a generic demo. Every recommendation comes with a path to measurable impact.
Playbooks that scale across the fund
What works in one portfolio company becomes a reusable pattern for the next. Codify the wins, kill the rest early, and report progress in language ready for the board.
How it works
From vendor noise to a decision in five business days.
A structured pipeline that turns messy pitches into recommendations grounded in evidence, every time, the same way.
Describe the workflow
You give us a clear description of the workflow you want to improve or automate in a portfolio company: the current process, the systems involved, the team responsible, the pain points, the desired outcome, and your requirements around security, compliance, integration, and business impact.
Evaluate in context
We handle the incoming vendor noise, extract every claim, attach evidence, and score each solution against your specific workflow: fit, integration feasibility, risk, evidence quality, and business impact.
Decide with confidence
You receive a ranked decision (ignore, ask, demo, run diligence, or pilot) with vendor fit cards, follow up questions, and pilot charters ready for the board.
Capabilities
Evaluation grounded in evidence,
built around your workflows.
We assess each solution the way an operating partner would, if they had unlimited time and a perfect memory of every vendor.
Workflow fit scoring
Every vendor scored against a specific portfolio company workflow, not a generic category, across nine weighted dimensions.
Learn moreVendor claim ledger
Each claim is extracted, sourced, and tracked: what was said, where it was said, and whether it holds up under diligence.
Learn moreRisk and feasibility flags
Integration, security, compliance, and duplicate tool risks surfaced before procurement or legal are ever engaged.
Learn morePilot ready charters
Promising vendors come with baselines, success criteria, kill criteria, and a scoped, measurable experiment.
Learn moreWhere we start
Built for the portfolios with the most to gain.
Sectors with repetitive, document heavy, and labor intensive workflows, where the right AI vendor moves margins, and the wrong one wastes a year.
Admin heavy rollups
Referral follow up, prior authorization, revenue cycle denials, intake, and scheduling. These are high volume workflows where vendor claims rarely survive a question about health record integration.
Document and labor heavy operations
Accounts payable, payroll support, contract intake, proposal response, and close acceleration. Measurable savings with lower regulatory drag.
Messy workflows bound to old systems
Quote automation, procurement, scheduling, and document processing. Lower AI maturity, real friction, and integration realities that demand neutral triage.
Portfolios with high awareness
Support deflection, customer success automation, sales enablement, and engineering copilots. Easier to pilot, but the most AI theater to filter.
The output
A decision, not a deck summary.
Every screen returns the same structured artifact: a scored vendor fit card, the claims that hold up and the ones that do not, and a clear next action your team can act on today.
Scored, not summarized
An overall fit score backed by a transparent breakdown, so the verdict is defensible rather than a vibe.
Claims separated from proof
Marketing language never becomes fact. Every claim carries its evidence and its verification status.
A specific next action
Not “looks interesting.” A concrete recommendation: the questions to ask and the pilot to run, or the reason to pass.
Why us
Built by engineers who shipped
software at Apple.
We have built systems where the bar for evidence, privacy, and detail was not negotiable. Mainspan brings that discipline to vendor evaluation: no claim without proof, no recommendation without rationale, and a person reviewing every output that reaches your team.
Get started
Tell us the workflow.
We will tell you what fits.
Describe the workflow you want to improve in a portfolio company. We evaluate the AI solutions under consideration against that context and return a ranked decision grounded in fit, risk, feasibility, and business impact.