BoardBrain
Request a briefing
Independent intelligence for boards, CEOs and investors

Where value is trapped in your company. And what will unlock it.

BoardBrain gives a board the clarity a private owner takes for granted: an independent, evidence-grade reading of the company it governs — the value the market is not paying for, the moves that would release it, and the questions that cannot be hedged. Maintained daily, by subscription. Every fact traced to its source.

01 — The engagement
01 · THE MANDATE

One company per engagement.

Typically the one you govern; sometimes a peer or a target. Nothing is required of you — the work is built entirely from the outside. No access, no data room, no IT project.

02 · THE WORK

We read everything.

The company and its whole peer set — thousands of documents, a decade deep, including licensed sources behind paywalls — every fact verified and locked to its source.

03 · THE DELIVERY

A private dashboard, maintained daily.

The thesis, the ranked questions, the activist letter, ask-anything and the daily brief — delivered to every director you choose, kept current every day.

02 — The governance gap

Private owners compound value. Public boards watch it leak.

A privately owned company runs on one rigorous value-creation thesis, shared by owner, board and chief executive. The public company — supposedly the summit of modern capitalism — too often does the reverse: its board is over-loaded, under-informed, and dependent on management for almost everything it knows.

The result is not a rounding error. It is billions, sitting locked inside good companies, because no one in the room is paid to read the company from the outside.

“Eight-hundred-page decks. Long, but weak. I spend two days reconciling management’s story with what I hear outside.”
A director of a European listed company, in conversation with us, 2026
63%
of listed companies earn returns below their cost of capital — quietly, often for a decade, before anyone forces the issue.
Damodaran, NYU Stern, long-run global data
3050%
of its value is what a bottom-quartile company loses over a decade. The dispersion is what kills value-takers.
BCG Value Creators · Lazard
2 of 3
of that loss is already done by the time an activist arrives. The board’s window to act is years earlier — if it can see clearly.
Analysis of activist-campaign timelines
03 — The clock

Most of the loss happens before anyone writes a letter.

Underperformance shows in the public record years before an activist names it. Someone may already be building that case on your company — an activist, or a private-equity buyer pricing a take-private. BoardBrain puts the same case in front of your board first: the analysis without the demands, the challenge without the public fight, the timing still your own.

Where the value goes — a typical course
UNDERPERFORMANCE BEGINS THE BOARD COULD ACT THE ACTIVIST ARRIVES most of the loss is already behind you
Illustrative
04 — The dashboard

Not a report. A dashboard that never sleeps.

Day one, it gives a director the depth of the company in one sitting. After that it runs every day — reading each filing, transcript and news item through the company’s value-creation thesis, and answering any question with the source shown.

01

The dashboard

The thesis, the value bridge, the financial X-ray, governance, the activist lens.

02

The questions

For the CEO and CFO, ranked by leverage on the share price. The few that cannot be hedged.

03

The activist letter

The case the most-likely activist would make — so the board sees it first.

04

Ask anything

Strategy, peers, scenarios — every answer cites the filing line or transcript page.

05

The daily brief

Every news item read through the thesis: the “so what”, and the question to ask next.

Inside the dashboard
 BOARDBRAIN · THE DASHBOARD
YOUR QUESTION  ·  TUESDAY, 07:40
“What is the Street’s consensus on us — and what would move it?”
THE SIGNAL
A lukewarm hold — “the core is fine, prove the rest.” Consensus won’t shift until the returns gap to the closest peer closes and project-level returns are disclosed.
EVERY CLAIM
SOURCE-TRACED
READ AGAINST
THE THESIS
THE DASHBOARD DID THE READING — ON A TUESDAY, NOT JUST ON BOARD DAY

Representation of the dashboard. Wording illustrative; every answer in product is source-traced.

05 — Why a director with ChatGPT cannot do this

A general AI shows you the house. This tells you what it’s worth — and how to build it.

ChatGPT and Claude are excellent the way an architect’s sketch is excellent: direction, framing, context. A board cannot take a decision on a sketch. BoardBrain is the execution plan — the sum-of-the-parts, the computation of the value to unlock, every figure traced to its source. Built to be decided on, not admired.

Two things make that impossible to shortcut:

FACTS

No fact touches the model

Every number, quote and name is extracted, verified and locked before the language model narrates around it. A missing fact fails the build; it is never invented. That is why BoardBrain does not hallucinate on facts — by construction, not by promise.

ECONOMICS

10,000× more reading, paid once

A general assistant answers from a thin slice, because compute is priced per question. Answering a board-grade question properly means reading the company’s full evidence base — orders of magnitude more than any assistant will do on demand. We pay that cost once, up front, and every question after that is answered from the verified asset in seconds.

The reading behind a single answer
A GENERAL AI ~10,000 tokens A BOARD-GRADE ANSWER ~100,000,000 tokens

Thousands of documents per company — the company and every peer, a decade deep, including licensed research behind paywalls a general assistant cannot reach.

Illustrative order of magnitude, not to scale
1,000–5,000
documents read per company — filings, transcripts, licensed sell-side research, industry and pricing data.
Per company file, order of magnitude
once
is how often that cost is paid. Every question after that is answered from the verified asset, in seconds.
The economics of the dashboard

The full argument, with the method behind it: why it’s true.

06 — Inside the brain

An activist, a banker and a strategist — trained into one system.

No general model, and no single advisor, holds all three at once. That combination is what produces a board-grade point of view, not a summary.

ACTIVIST

Two hundred campaigns

How activists pick targets, how they attack, and exactly how they plan to create value — so the board takes the actions that mean the activist never appears.

BANKER

The sell-side, analyst by analyst

The questions each analyst asks, what they reward, what they punish — used to prepare CEOs and CFOs before the questions are asked.

STRATEGIST

Decades of strategy work

Where a sector’s real moats, disruptors and threats lie; what is table-stakes and what is genuinely differentiated — and where a company can win.

REVIEW

Human judgement on top

The method is reviewed by former investors and global heads of equity research. Every fact traced to its source; nothing asserted that cannot be shown.

07 — Whose side are we on

Not the CEO’s. Not the board’s. Value creation’s.

BoardBrain is unpartisan and independent. No client to please, no rating to defend, no engagement to renew. We tell the truth, traced to its source — which is exactly why a board or a CEO can trust that what it says is true, not merely convenient.

When the analysis shows value on the table, it deserves to be acted on. So the case is made constructively, and it escalates — to the people who own the company.

FIRST

The CEO

If the CEO sees the value and acts, we are done. Most cases end here — as they should.

THEN

The board

The CEO’s own principals. If the board acts, we are done.

THEN

The owners

The investors whose capital is at stake.

LAST

The public record

If no one will act on a clear, evidenced case, we are prepared to publish our point of view.

Every step constructive. Every step pointing at the same north star: the value gets created, and captured by the people who own the company. That conviction is not a risk to a board — it is the reason a board can rely on what the file says.

08 — Who it serves

Test us on a company you know better than we do.

Name it. The file is built before we call. One hour, the live dashboard, and your own knowledge of the company as the benchmark.

Request a briefing