For buyers of founder-run companies

Thirty years in the founder's head. You get 100 days.

When the handover period ends, the answers stop. Antares uses those first months to get the knowledge out: exit interviews captured on the record, documents and tools flowing into a private company memory, and a cited Advisor your team can ask long after the founder stops picking up the phone.

Post-close install — starts the day you take the keysEvery answer cited— or it refuses
Plugs into what the business already runs on
100 days
The install window — your first months of ownership
1 source
Behind every claim the Advisor makes — or it refuses
0
Cross-company reads — every tenant fully isolated
30 days
To full deletion when you leave, export in hand
Why this exists

The data room had the numbers. It didn't have how the business runs.

You bought the trucks, the shop, and the customer list. The thing that makes them worth the price — how the work actually gets done — is in one person's head. And that person is leaving.

Transfers at closing What you bought

  • Three years of financials, recast and diligenced
  • The contracts, the leases, the equipment list
  • The customer list and the org chart
  • A binder labelled “operations”

Retires with the founder What runs it

  • How rush jobs get priced — and which customers get the real price
  • The supplier terms that live on a handshake from 2011
  • Why the biggest account stays, even at 70 days to pay
  • Which machine breaks first, what it sounds like, and who to call
  • What the foreman actually does all day

The first list transfers on a bill of sale. The second list drives the earnings — and it walks out the door on the founder's last day. Sellers feel the same thing from the other side: a business that only works with you standing in it isn't transferable.

The mechanism

The documents go in. Every answer comes out cited.

Antares builds a private memory of the company you bought — from its own documents, tools, and the founder's own words — and puts a cited Advisor on top. Ask in plain language. Get the answer with its source. Or get an honest “that's not in the record.”

Capture The memory

Connect the tools the business already runs on and upload the closing set. Ingestion runs continuously — nothing depends on someone remembering to re-upload.

  • Google Workspace, Slack, and Granola sync today; Microsoft 365 is in rollout
  • Contracts, leases, SOPs, and quote PDFs go in by upload
  • Exit-interview transcripts flow in automatically

Answer The cited Advisor

Every answer is grounded in a source you can open — a contract, a transcript, an email thread. When the record doesn't hold the answer, it says so instead of guessing.

  • Plain-language questions, cited answers
  • Refuses rather than invents — a refusal tells you what to ask the founder next
  • Isolated to your company, always
1CloseYou take the keys
2ConnectTools and documents flow in
3InterviewThe founder's knowledge, on the record
4Memory buildsA private knowledge graph of the business
5AskCited answers for you and your team
6Stays currentIngestion never stops
The signature move

Interview the founder while you still can. Keep the answers forever.

The interview is the transfer

A structured interview series with the retiring owner and the people who hold the place together — keyed to what new owners actually ask: quoting, suppliers, customers, people, equipment. Granola sits on the calls, and the transcripts sync straight into the memory.

Ask a question in March, get his October answer — cited to the transcript. And every question the memory can't answer yet becomes next week's interview question, while he's still taking your calls.

The install

Your first 100 days, on the record.

The handover period is the one window when the knowledge is still in the building. The install is built around not wasting it.

Week 0

At close

Connect Google Workspace, Slack, and Granola. Upload the closing set — contracts, leases, SOPs, quote PDFs. Ingestion starts the same day.

What you haveA connected corpus.
Weeks 1–4

The exit interviews

The structured series with the founder and key staff, while goodwill is high and memory is fresh. Granola captures every session; transcripts sync in automatically.

What you haveThe transcript set — his answers, on the record.
Weeks 2–8

The memory builds

You and your managers ask it real questions. Every cited answer is one thing nobody has to interrupt the founder for. Every refusal becomes next week's interview question.

What you haveThe question ledger, shrinking.
Weeks 8–14

The founder steps back

New hires and your GM onboard against the memory instead of shadowing whoever is left. The Advisor becomes where questions go first.

What you haveA team that asks the memory before they ask around.
Always on

The memory doesn't stop at the handover

The binder was stale the day it was printed. Antares keeps ingesting — new email, new meetings, new documents — so the memory tracks the business you're running now, not a snapshot from closing week.

  • Runs 24/7, with no manual re-uploads
  • New and changed documents flow in on their own
  • The founder's transcripts stay; the live business keeps adding to them
  • The Advisor answers from today, cited to the source
Live, company ingestion24 / 7
Folding new company data into the memory, without anyone having to ask.
Side by side

The binder, the consult clause, or the memory.

Every acquisition already pays for knowledge transfer — a transition-services clause, a consulting period, a binder. Here is what changes when the transfer is captured instead of promised. Select any row to go deeper.

What transfers
The traditional handover
With Antares OS

The traditional transfer is a consulting period and a binder. Antares turns the same period into a permanent record: documents, tools, and recorded interviews, all queryable, all cited.

Most purchase agreements buy you months of the seller's time. When it lapses — or the relationship cools — the answers are gone. Transcripts in the memory don't lapse.

Eighteen months in, the founder is fishing and your new estimator needs to know how rush work was priced. That's either an awkward call or a cited answer from interview #4.

A new GM's first ninety days are usually spent extracting tribal knowledge from whoever stayed. Against the memory, they ask the Advisor first and people second.

A handover binder describes closing week. The memory keeps ingesting the live business — new email, new meetings, new documents — so it describes now.

Every answer carries the source it came from, so you can open the contract or the transcript and check. When the record doesn't hold the answer, it refuses instead of guessing.

For sellers

Make the business run without you — before you list it.

You spent thirty years building something that works. If it only works because you're standing in it, it isn't transferable — and every buyer who walks the shop can feel that.

Same install, opposite direction: connect the tools, sit for the interviews on your own schedule, and show any buyer a business that answers questions from the record instead of from your memory. The way you do things, written down at last — not walking around in your head. Sellers apply to the same pilot below.

Your data

Isolated. Cited. Yours to take back.

You are handing over the most sensitive record a company has. The posture is built for that — and stated plainly, so your counsel can verify it instead of taking our word.

One evidence layerevery source, answer, model call, and key rotation — on the record

Security review What your team can verify

  • Each company is isolated to its own tenant — one company can never read another's data
  • Every answer carries the citation it came from
  • AI calls run on your own API key (BYOK) — your key, your retention settings
  • Model and cost are recorded per call; key rotation is logged

Your exit What you keep control of

  • Your data never trains anyone's model
  • Export your company's memory on request
  • We delete your tenant within 30 days of leaving
  • No lock-in clause in the contract

SOC 2 is a planned path, not a certificate we hold — we say so here because you would find out anyway. The full posture is on the Trust page.

Straight answers

What it does today. What's on the bench.

You verify claims for a living, so here are ours, pre-sorted. What's shipped, you can test in a demo. What isn't, we'll tell you to your face.

Shipped Working today

  • The cited Advisor — grounded answers with sources, refusal instead of guessing
  • Per-company isolation, BYOK, export-and-delete
  • Google Workspace, Slack, and Granola sync (Microsoft 365 in rollout)
  • PDF and text document upload
  • Meeting and interview capture via Granola — the exit-interview engine

On the bench Roadmap, stated plainly

  • QuickBooks and accounting ingestion
  • Excel workbooks
  • Scanned paper (OCR)
  • Full data-room-scale bulk ingestion
  • Department AI employees on the company's data
  • SOC 2 certification
  • Outcome and time-saved reporting

Until accounting ingestion ships: export the reports you care about as PDFs and upload them — the Advisor cites them like any other document.

The pilot

Bring a business changing hands. We'll bring the install.

We take pilot companies at the pace our install capacity allows — no marketing counter. Tell us about the deal, and we'll tell you honestly whether the product is ready for it.

You bring

  • A business closed recently or closing soon — or one you're getting ready to sell
  • $2M to $50M in revenue — trades, manufacturing, services
  • A founder willing to sit for the interviews
  • An Anthropic API key — AI runs on your key, with no platform markup

We bring

  • Hands-on install by the team that built it
  • The exit-interview kit and the question ledger
  • A straight answer on what's shipped and what isn't
  • Your full export if you walk
Apply for the pilot Applications are read by the founder, not a funnel.
Asked on the first call

Straight answers

No — and we won't pretend otherwise. Antares installs after close, in your first hundred days. Before close the data isn't yours and the consent gets murky, so we stay out of it. What we do promise: we're ready to switch on the day you take the keys. Sellers are the exception — it's your own data, start whenever you like.

Not yet. Accounting ingestion is on the roadmap, near the top. Today you export the reports you care about as PDFs and upload them — the Advisor cites them like any other document. A live QuickBooks connection doesn't exist yet, and we won't pretend it does.

Honest answer: Excel parsing and scanned-paper OCR are roadmap, not shipped. Today the system reads digital PDFs and text, plus everything flowing through Google Workspace, Slack, and Granola. The exit interviews carry a surprising share of what the filing cabinets know — and that part works today.

A structured series with the retiring owner and the people who hold the place together. We bring the question set — quoting, suppliers, customers, people, equipment. Granola sits on the calls, and the transcripts sync into the memory automatically. Ask a question in March, get his October answer, cited to the transcript.

The Advisor says so and stops. No guessing. Early on, those refusals are the product: they're your list of what to ask the founder while he's still taking your calls.

Isolated to your company's own tenant, and it never trains anyone's model. AI calls run on your own API key. Ask for an export and you get your memory out; we delete your tenant within 30 days. No hostage clause.

Yes. Same install, opposite direction: connect the tools, sit for the interviews on your own schedule, and list a business that can answer questions without your phone number. Start before you sell — the longer the memory has been running, the more of the business it holds when buyers start asking questions.

We won't claim that. Nobody can prove a multiple, so we don't sell one. What we will claim: your business becomes one that answers questions about how it runs — cited to its own records — without you in the room. What that's worth at the table is between you and the buyer.

The founder retires. The knowledge doesn't.

Every succession loses something. The machines transfer on a bill of sale. The knowledge transfers only if you capture it — and you have about a hundred days before it stops taking your calls.