DarkSkreen: Investment screening for VC

DarkSkreen is a screening tool from the intelligence analytics company DarkSkope.  It delivers rapid, data-driven background checks that verify identity, integrity, and risk, ensuring trust, compliance, and confidence in every decision. 

This paper explains how Darkskreen can be deployed as a platform for VC due diligence and risk monitoring.

Darkskreen addresses the fundamental limitations of traditional due diligence: effort, depth and dynamic monitoring. By integrating a VC firm's internal data (portfolio companies, co-investors and key personnel) with external commercial datasets, the platform transforms risk management from a shallow, pre-deal checkpoint into a continuous and deep risk monitoring and alerting capability.

Overcoming due diligence friction

Modern investment strategies demand a risk management system that is comprehensive and accessible. Traditional due diligence fails in key areas:

1. Network Map Challenge (Hidden connections): Companies’ and peoples’ relationships are difficult to map across multiple datasets.  Human analysts cannot cope with the scale or the complexity of big data.  Challenges include everything from misspellings and differing address formats to bad actors intentionally use aliases or complex structures to obfuscate ownership. Relying on simple database checks is a recipe for missed connections and dangerous blind spots.  For example, an LP in a co-investing fund may be registered as a British national in one corporate registry but as a Russian, with a different spelling, in another.

   
   

2. Event and Volatility Analysis.  VCs need to understand how appointments, ownership structures and registrations of portfolio and stakeholders have evolved over time, and in relation to its peer group.  For example, introductions of sanctions may have provoked changes in directorships or corporate registrations. 

   
   

3. Geopolitical Risk: For VCs investing into defence, national security or high-value IP, assessing risk now requires specialised data that links corporate structures to foreign state influence, military procurement, or sensitive R&D, a requirement that exceeds standard financial and legal compliance standards.

   
   

4. Continuous monitoring (Post-investment): Risk changes daily. A partner, co-investor, or supplier who was compliant at the time of investment can be sanctioned or implicated in adverse activity months later. The fund requires continuous vigilance to protect its assets from evolving threats.

A single view of risk intelligence

The platform solves these challenges through an integrated analytical architecture. It maps the VC firm's internal data to external risk intelligence commercial datasets, creating a single, authoritative view of every company and person within the fund's portfolio.

Core Capability: Discover true identity and uncover hidden relationships

Darkskreen overcomes the ambiguity challenge by acting as an intelligent detective, resolving identities across the integrated datasets.  Even ‘dirty’ or intentionally obfuscated data is correctly linked.  This process develops intelligence from across multiple data categories:

Data Category	Illustrative External Data Example	Purpose and Outcome
VC Internal Data	Portfolio list, key employees, historical relationships.	Anchors external risk alerts directly to the firm's assets and relationships.
Financial Risk	Moody's/Dun & Bradstreet.	Provides independent verification of credit health and operational stability.
Regulatory Compliance	Dow Jones Risk & Compliance.	Covers global sanctions, watchlists, and Politically Exposed Persons (PEPs).
Geopolitical Intelligence	Datenna, Sayari.	Maps risk to foreign state influence, military procurement, and sensitive R&D.

Core Capability: Temporal Change and Network Analysis

The platform monitors entities and relationships, flagging shifts and changes in governance.  The system identifies events that might signal organisational distress or non-compliance: high frequency of director changes, late statutory filings, unexplained complex shifts in ownership structure, entry of ‘bad actors’ or IP acquisition.

Dynamic risk monitoring

The platform delivers clear, actionable insight across the entire investment life cycle from initial investigation to exit.  The VC has a risk dashboard and alerting systems which provides real-time insight into current risk.  For example, Darkskreen could monitor:

• Structural Risk Warning: If a portfolio company begins showing signs of Structural Volatility (e.g., late filings combined with director turnover), the system generates an alert. Outcome: Allows the firm to intervene proactively on governance or operational issues before financial distress escalates.

  
  

• Network Cascade Alert: The platform identifies when a co-investor in one portfolio company becomes associated with a high-risk entity in a separate, external deal. Outcome: Assesses the risk contagion across the firm's entire asset base, enabling timely risk mitigation strategies.

  
  

• Regulatory Watch: All entities (portfolio, co-investors, key personnel) are continuously screened against regulatory lists. Outcome: Ensures the fund maintains continuous compliance, fulfilling fiduciary duties to Limited Partners (LPs) regarding regulatory exposure.

About DarkSkope

DarkSkope is founded by national security, military and law enforcement professionals.  We help complex organisations make better and faster decisions. We are experts at connecting the dots between records spread across siloed systems, enriching that information with high-value data, and applying workflows and analytics that actually drive results.

Whether that’s onboarding a vendor you can trust, stopping a stolen cargo movement, or spotting a risky subcontractor before it’s a headline. We co-deliver outcomes, not just software, helping customers find the truth in their data.