M&A due diligence typically takes 6 weeks — 30 to 45 business days — from the executed LOI to close, for a standard middle-market deal. The clock starts when the LOI is signed, and the schedule is dominated by document review. Understanding the week-by-week flow shows why the reading is the bottleneck and where AI changes the timeline.
Week 1 — Data Room Launch
The LOI is executed, setting scope, exclusivity, and timeline. A secure virtual data room goes live. Initial document requests go out — corporate records, financials, legal files, cap tables — and the seller begins uploading while the buy-side starts triage. The deal team aligns internally on objectives and which workstreams carry the most weight for this specific deal.
Weeks 2 to 3 — First-Pass Functional Reviews
This is the document-review core. First-pass functional reviews run across legal, financial, commercial, tech, and HR simultaneously. Subject-matter experts conduct deep dives, documents are reviewed for completeness and red flags, and requests for clarification are logged in real time in the Q&A module. The volume of reading in these two weeks is what drives the cost and gates the schedule.
Week 4 Onward — Interviews, Resolution, Close
Management interviews and site visits happen in week 4, followed by issues resolution — negotiating how the red flags found affect price, structure, and indemnification — and the path to close. When document review in weeks 2 to 3 is slow or incomplete, the entire downstream timeline compresses or slips. The AI agent collapses the first-pass review, doing the reading in days rather than two weeks. It's demonstrated at omnionlinestrategies.com/ai-agent-ma-due-diligence.