Other AI tools score your idea in 30 seconds. Crucible runs an agentic deep dive of institutional-grade diligence with frontier models, the way a real investment committee actually would — every claim cited, every validation measured — then tells you the cold hard facts of whether the idea survives it, and how to best sharpen it.
Forged on timing and demand. Cracks at the moat — defensibility is assumed, not evidenced.
The read doesn't end at the verdict — one pass proposes three distinct directions: a sharper angle, a stronger version, a better pivot — the sharpest, strongest, and best the evidence rewards — each scored honestly. Pick one, apply in a click, revertable.
Founder, VC, family office, accelerator, corporate, university, or studio — bring an idea, a deck, a list, or a thesis.
A complete first pass through the studio frameworks, free, in about a minute — then web-sourced Deep Diligence in hours when it earns it.
Advance, kill, or sharpen: stage gates, three stronger directions, and an investor memo you can forward — every claim cited.
The read a sharp VC gives your idea — market, moat, deal-killers, capital stack — then three stronger directions for it.
The objections surface now, not mid-pitch.
Clickable inline citations behind the market, competition, and capital analyses.
A sharper angle, a stronger version, a better pivot — the sharpest, strongest, best the evidence rewards. Pick one, apply in a click.
An accelerator takes equity for this read. An advisor takes a point. Your first read is free, the sharper, stronger, alternative versions are yours, and the idea stays yours.
Stress-test the deals you're shown against sourced market reality — claims checked, comparables pulled, scoped to your thesis.
Market sized from primary data, with the pitch-deck delta flagged.
Reads scoped to your sectors — and where a deal overlaps your book.
A defensible one-pager you can forward to co-investors.
Defensible, sourced reads on every direct deal — scoped to your thesis, alert to overlap with your book — for a fraction of an analyst-day, and forwardable to co-investors.
Every deal becomes a sourced, exportable deep-dive — claims checked, market sized, comparables pulled. Defensible to your IC.
Citations your associate can click, your IC can challenge.
Founder narrative tested against patents, filings, and market data.
See where a deal overlaps your book — validation and conflict are two readings of the same data.
Plus a portfolio lens no generic tool has — where a deal overlaps your book, validation and conflict surface before the partner call.
The frameworks and diligence run themselves, so your mentors stay human — every team on one playbook, every milestone on the record.
Stage gates and milestone evidence per team — mentor sessions start from the record, not status updates.
The common pitfalls investors screen for — thin moats, broken unit economics, inflated TAMs — flagged early enough to design around.
The frameworks and diligence run themselves; your mentors' hours go to judgment and relationships.
Scale the program without diluting the culture: AI runs the framework education and evidence layer, humans do the coaching — and more of your teams get funded because the pitfalls investors screen for get flagged — and designed around — months before demo day.
From your company name: core, adjacent, and transformative growth spaces — built on your real patents and capabilities, ranked and sourced.
Opportunities grounded in your patents and inventors, not generic trends.
A scored chessboard of where to play next, with white-space density.
Every cell traces to sources a strategy committee can audit.
Every cell of the growth map traces to your real assets, so the strategy committee audits evidence instead of debating opinions.
Give your TTO and inventors investment-grade diligence — every disclosure triaged to a ranked, fundable concept, audit-ready from day one. Back what can build a company; retire the rest early.
Whole disclosure portfolios triaged against market and patent reality.
Every advance and kill decision carries clickable sources.
Full thesis breadth for a fraction of a two-analyst team.
Give your cohort a shared pool of Deep Diligence credits — access they can't mint themselves.
Audit-ready at the technology-transfer interface, without manual reconstruction.
From thesis to launch — map the space, rank the concepts, run stage-gate diligence on shared evidence that compounds across studios.
Structured kill paths end drifting concepts decisively.
Every concept's research compounds into the next one's head start.
The full operating system for the price of one data subscription.
Every concept's diligence feeds the next — your source library, benchmarks, and kill rationale deepen with each read.
Stage gates, kill paths, and frameworks hardened in production — the same diligence the best studios run, on every concept. The rigor that used to cost a team's salary now costs a subscription, so you can put far more ideas under heat and kill the weak ones earlier.
Your score, brief, and sharper, stronger, alternative versions of the idea are free — every idea distilled to one comparable, PDF-able page. The sourced diligence behind each section unlocks with a build.
Your score, brief, and sharper, stronger, alternative versions of the idea are free — the wedge, the market, the first deal-killer in the clear; the sourced diligence behind each section unlocks with a build.
Blink verdict, score, validated potential, and all three stronger directions on a single printable page — the same layout for every idea, built to PDF and compare side by side.
The same brief fills in with a sourced, section-by-section summary — ready to send to a partner.
Recalibration shows its work: “-15 · competitive: fatal incumbent,” tied to the source.
A 24-month model turns burn and runway into “raise ~$750K for ~16%,” straight to a cap table.
Drop a deck, interview notes, or a journey map — it primes every analysis as primary input.
A build coordinates the full battery — fourteen agentic research runs, every claim searched, sourced, and cited — then unblurs the Brief section by section and re-grounds every score against what it found.
Customer & segments, founder DD, regulatory, technology & IP, timing, comparables, market sizing, competitive, pricing, willingness-to-pay, unit economics, go-to-market, and deal terms — synthesized into a readiness read and the Investor Memo.
Clickable citations behind every material claim — no assertion without a source, or an honest “evidence absent.”
Six risk calls — founder, regulatory, technology, timing, execution, terms — each scored, explained, and tied to its analysis.
Drop decks, financials, research at kickoff — the build reads them first, and flags when they change.
Owned IP verified against USPTO assignment records; raise history pulled from Form D filings on EDGAR — records, not scraped claims.
The battery runs server-side and checkpoints as it goes — close the tab, the build keeps forging.
The read scales its skepticism to maturity — idea, concept, building, in market, funded. A napkin sketch is scored on potential; a funded launch with no traction takes the full heat. Stage is auto-stamped from the evidence — an SEC Form D filing, live market signals — or set it yourself.
Five gates from idea to funded. The validation penalty dials up with each one, so early ideas aren't punished for evidence they couldn't have yet — and launched companies can't hide behind “early.”
Severity tracks how far the build has outrun the evidence — a napkin and a funded company face different heat for the same missing proof.
Log what public research can't see — pilots, subscriptions, LOIs — and fold it into the read in one explicit, audited recalibration. Nothing moves silently.
Drag a concept across the gate board and the verdict re-tempers — you see the score before → after ahead of the move.
The synthesis at the top of the ladder: kill cases argued from the evidence, the recalibrated verdict, and the three forged directions — exportable, and defensible when the committee pushes back.
The memo pressure-tests every built module against the findings — where a claim is unsupported, it says so, with the source that broke it.
The objections surface now — named incumbents, broken economics, regulatory walls — not mid-pitch.
A sharper angle, a stronger version, a better pivot — the sharpest, strongest, best the evidence rewards. Pick one, apply in a click.
Send the memo itself — sourced, citable, IC-ready.
The canonical frameworks from academic research and top studios — each a structured, sourced, auditable artifact your team fills in against real evidence.
Pre-integrated, pre-sourced, pre-structured — so teams work against the framework, not on re-creating it. All fifteen are live in the product today — alongside 30+ structured framework modules and the fourteen agentic, web-sourced diligence analyses.
Frameworks feed a working operating system — the instruments below match who you said you are.
Value-chain stages × jobs-to-be-done, every cell scored for capital- and risk-adjusted opportunity.
| Write code | Review & PR | Debug & ship | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 · Plan | 52 | 31 | 46 |
| 2 · Build | ★ 84Caret | 57 | 22 |
| 3 · Ship | 49 | 71 | 44 |
Eight-dimension diligence score with gap analysis and failure-mode checks.
LLM-simulated buyer panels rank what actually drives willingness to pay — before you survey a human.
Every focus industry decomposed into stages — the row axis of your chessboard, with white space flagged.
Anonymized cross-studio benchmarks no single tool — or LLM — could assemble.
An in-product co-pilot that drafts edits and researches founders — but proposes; you approve. Not a chatbot you copy-paste from.
The score, the Concept Brief, and sharper, stronger, alternative versions of your idea, back in hours. No card to start.
The three things that separate a Crucible read from a 30-second AI guess.
A decisive, sourced go-or-kill in days — not the weeks an analyst bench takes.
Every score traces to a clickable source — no “per internal analysis,” no hallucinated numbers.
The depth of an analyst-day for the price of a build. Pay only for what you forge.
Journal unlimited ideas, blink-score them all, and read every Concept Brief free — a credit is only spent when you send a concept into Deep Diligence.
How Crucible credits work — like Audible, for venture diligence.
One concept, taken all the way through the crucible. Browsing, blink scores and Concept Briefs are free — a credit is spent only when you forge a full Deep Diligence build.
No membership? Buy credits one at a time at $99. Join a tier and every credit costs less — the more you commit, the lower the price.
Monthly drops a fresh bundle each month; Annual and Early-Believer prepay at a deeper rate and load the term. Unused credits roll over — they are yours.
Run dry before the next bundle? Buy more credits at your tier's price — never back at the $99 a-la-carte rate.
| Investor-grade | Team | Studio | Campus | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price | $99 / concept | $800 / mo | $2,000 / mo | from $5,000 / mo |
| ≈ Per concept (annual) | $82 | $53 | $44 | $40 |
| Deep Diligence builds / yr | pay as you go | ~150 | ~450 | ~1,250 pooled |
| Seats | per user | Unlimited | Unlimited | Org-wide · SSO |
| Source library | per concept | Shared | Multi-studio | Org-wide |
| NAICS domain access | — | 30 codes | 60 codes | Full map |
| IP / audit trail | Export | Export | IP tracking | Bayh-Dole |
| Start free | Start trial | Request | Talk to us |
1 build = 1 Deep Diligence run; browse, blink scores, Concept Briefs, and Forged Versions stay unlimited. Need more than your pool? Top up with credit packs — no overage walls. Per-build figures are sized at today’s compute rates. Past your tier’s NAICS cap, additional codes are $600/year each. Annual billing saves two months on every tier. Invite a founder and you both get a free build.
Decisions without sources are innovation theater. Here's the honest answer to every alternative.
It’ll sound brilliant in seconds — but a chat keeps no sourced evidence trail, and no track record it’s measured against. Crucible is the system around the model — auditable diligence, calibrated on real studio outcomes.
A place to write things down — no source discipline, no kill paths, and nothing that builds on itself. Every studio that starts here rebuilds it; Crucible is already that system.
18–24 months of engineering and upkeep to reinvent it — with none of the cross-studio learning. Build ventures, not the platform that builds them.
Service-dependent: the capability walks out when the engagement ends, and the evidence stays on their laptops. Crucible is the institutional memory — it stays and compounds across your portfolio.
Your workspace is walled off by row-level security — no other customer, human or AI, can read your concepts. The isolation test suite runs in CI on every release; if it fails, nothing ships.
Nothing you submit is shown to another user or fed into a shared model. Any benchmark we build is anonymized aggregate only — with no link back to your workspace, by schema, not by promise.
What you submit and what we generate for you is yours: exportable memos, full version history, deletion on request. Concepts are processed by enterprise AI APIs that don't train on your data. We never train on the content of your ideas either — our scoring calibration learns from anonymized, aggregate outcomes only, never from what you wrote, with no link back to your workspace.
A decade of venture building — fund diligence, studio company creation, university venture programs — systematized into the tool its builder always wished existed. Crucible is the refining fire: it either breaks your idea, or hardens it to withstand the heat. The full story →
If you are running a research-disclosure pipeline, a multi-concept portfolio, or a single committed founder thesis — and you are tired of decks pretending to be decisions — we'd like to talk.