M&A and corporate development
Your due diligence call notes are passing through a company the NDA never named
Ghosty Notes records management calls, diligence sessions and deal reviews from your Mac’s own audio, transcribes them on the device, and writes the notes to a folder you control.
Ghosty Notes runs on macOS on a Mac with Apple Silicon, because transcription runs on the chip itself. Intel Macs are not supported.
no notetaker in this list
what the other side sees while you record
A live deal generates a punishing volume of conversation. Management presentations, the CFO on working capital, a quality of earnings walkthrough, lender calls, three internal deal reviews a week, and the call where the seller says the thing about customer concentration that nobody wrote down. Ten weeks later, in the confirmatory phase, the question is always the same: what exactly did they tell us in the first meeting?
The usual answer is a cloud notetaker on every call. That solves the memory problem and creates another. The recording of a confidential management discussion now sits with a company that is not you, not your counsel, and not named anywhere in the NDA you signed to reach the data room.
Ghosty Notes takes the opposite approach. It records from your Mac’s system audio, so nothing joins and no seller watches an unfamiliar participant appear in the middle of a management meeting. Transcription runs on the machine itself, and your audio never leaves the device on any plan. The output is markdown files in a folder you pick, so they go straight into the deal folder alongside everything else.
The NDA problem nobody raises until confirmatory diligence
Read the confidentiality agreement you signed on the last deal. The permitted-disclosure clause almost certainly lets you share confidential information with your employees and with your "Representatives", and then defines Representatives as some list of directors, officers, employees, affiliates, counsel, accountants and financing sources. It is a carefully drawn list, because the seller is deciding exactly how far their information is allowed to travel.
There is a live question about whether an AI platform provider falls inside that definition. The argument runs like this: when you put an AI notetaker on a diligence call, the confidential information is disclosed to the vendor operating the platform, and that vendor is neither your employee nor, on most standard drafting, one of the listed Representatives. If that reading holds on your particular agreement, the disclosure is unauthorised, and you have created a breach without anyone on the deal team ever deciding to do anything.
This is a contractual exposure, not a regulatory one, and the distinction matters. No agency is going to fine you, and nobody sends you a questionnaire about it. The consequence lands in the least convenient place instead: seller’s counsel raising it in the confirmatory phase, a rep and warranty question, a retrade lever handed to the other side for free, or an awkward conversation with a co-investor about how a competitor’s name ended up in a transcript held by a third party. It is also one of the few risks on a deal you close by choosing a different tool rather than by negotiating, which makes it unusually cheap to deal with.
The architectural answer is short. When the recording, the transcription and the notes all happen on the machine in front of you, no vendor receives the confidential information, because there is no transmission. That is precisely the position the NDA assumed you were in when it was drafted. Read your own agreement before you rely on any of this, and if the disclosure question is genuinely live on a deal, put it to your counsel rather than to a vendor’s marketing page.
- Our own reading of standard NDA drafting, offered as an argument rather than a citation
- Standard confidentiality agreements permit disclosure to employees and to a defined list of "Representatives", and an AI platform provider may not qualify. We are not attributing this to any publication. Put it to your own counsel; it is not decided law.
- In re Otter.AI Privacy Litigation, 5:25-cv-06911 (N.D. Cal.)
- Filed 15 August 2025. Noted only as evidence that third-party recording of private conversations is being litigated. No view taken on its merits.
How it fits a live process
Management presentations, and the forty minutes after
Record the management meeting and, more usefully, the unscripted part afterwards where the founder answers the questions that were not in the deck. Nothing joins, so a seller who has never met you does not spend two minutes asking who the extra participant is. The file lands in the folder you chose for that deal.
Diligence sessions with advisers
Quality of earnings walkthroughs, legal diligence calls, the adviser explaining a customer cohort chart. These are the calls where a number gets said once and matters at signing. The transcript means whoever writes the IC paper quotes rather than reconstructs.
Internal deal reviews and IC prep
Record your own Monday deal review and you have a dated record of what the team believed at each stage, including the concern raised early that later got buried. When the investment committee asks why the model changed, the answer is in a file rather than in an argument.
Ask across the whole deal before the next call
The MCP server lets Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor search your recorded calls on your Mac. Ask what the CFO said about deferred revenue, or every mention of the top customer across ten weeks, and get the answers with the meeting they came from. The server reads the files on your Mac and sends nothing by itself, but the AI app you point at it receives whatever text it asks for, so a hosted assistant sees those excerpts.
The honest objections from deal people
- Our analysts are on locked-down Windows machines.
- Then this tool is not for them, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. On a managed Windows build with no local install rights, Ghosty Notes cannot run, and no amount of internal advocacy changes that. It runs on macOS on a Mac with Apple Silicon. The people in deal work it fits own their own machine: independent sponsors, search fund principals, small corporate development teams, advisers. That is a real slice of the market and it is the one we are talking to.
- We just take notes by hand. Why change?
- Hand notes have genuine advantages and deserve a straight answer rather than a strawman. They create no artefact anyone can demand in a dispute, they force you to think while listening, and nobody asks permission to write on a pad. What they lose is everything you could not write while also asking the next question, permanently. If you are running six diligence calls a week and rebuilding them from memory into an IC paper, a transcript changes what you can credibly say. Plenty of deal teams do both: record the adviser calls, keep the pad for sensitive internal ones.
- We already have Fireflies deployed across the firm.
- Then you already have the workflow and the habit, and the switching cost is real. The reason to look is narrow: the NDA exposure described above, on the subset of your calls covered by a confidentiality agreement. Some firms keep their existing tool for internal and pipeline calls and record the covered diligence calls locally. That is coherent, and probably the realistic answer.
- Can the whole deal team see the same set of notes?
- No, and this is the sharpest limitation for deal work. There is no team plan, shared library, admin console or seat management. Each licence is one person recording to their own folder. A firm can buy several licences, and notes drop into a shared deal folder like any file, but no feature gives a partner a view across an associate’s meetings. If a central searchable deal-team library is the requirement, buy something else.
- Does recording create discoverable material we would rather not have?
- It can, and that is a real consideration rather than something to talk you out of. A transcript is a document, and documents can be requested in a dispute. Which calls to record is a judgement for you and counsel, not one a note-taking tool should make. Local processing changes who holds it and whether a third party can be asked separately. It does not make the record disappear.
- Do we need the seller’s permission?
- Yes, in the ordinary way. Consent rules depend on where the participants are, and some US states require all parties to consent. Ghosty Notes does not ask on your behalf, does not announce itself and creates no disclosure record. Asking the founder is your job, and doing it badly on a competitive process has its own cost.
Against what deal teams actually use
| Ghosty Notes | Alternatives | |
|---|---|---|
| Who receives the confidential information | Nobody. Processing happens on your Mac | Fireflies and Otter receive the call and hold the transcript |
| What the seller sees | Nothing joins. Recording is from system audio | Nothing, if their desktop capture is used; a named participant if it is not |
| Standard NDA disclosure clause | No third-party disclosure in local mode | A question counsel must answer about a named vendor |
| Completeness of the record | Full transcript, held by you | Full transcript, held by the vendor |
| Searching ten weeks of calls | Local MCP search over your own files | The vendor’s web app, or nothing if you used a pad |
| Where the notes end up | Markdown files written into the deal folder | In the vendor’s account, exported if you remember |
| Cost per person | Free, or Pro at $5.00 a month or $54.00 a year | Per-seat subscriptions across the firm |
Questions from deal teams
- If I turn on Pro’s hosted models, what actually gets sent?
- The transcript text, and only if you switch it on. Recording and transcription always run on your Mac and the audio never leaves the device, on any plan. Summaries and chat run locally by default. Pro’s hosted models and the fast cross-meeting chat send transcript text to that service for processing, never the audio. On a covered diligence call that is exactly the decision to think about, and in local mode nothing is sent.
- What hardware does it need?
- A Mac with Apple Silicon. Transcription runs on the chip in your machine, so an Intel Mac cannot run it. There is no Windows build and no web version.
- Does it work on a call that is not on Zoom or Teams?
- Yes. It records the audio your Mac is playing plus your microphone, so it covers any conferencing platform, a dial-in on speaker, and a meeting held in a room. Nothing has to be invited.
- Where do the notes go, and can I put them in the deal folder?
- They are markdown files written to a folder you choose. Point that at the deal folder in your document system and the transcript sits next to the CIM and the model.
- Can it tell who was speaking on a call with eight people?
- Speaker identification is a Pro feature and runs on your Mac like the rest. On the free plan the transcript is accurate but unlabelled, which is workable for two people and much less so for a management presentation with a full team on the line.
- Is there an audit trail proving the notes were not altered?
- No. These are ordinary files on your disk and you can edit them like any other file. If you need tamper-evident records for a regulated process, that is a document management question and this is not the tool that answers it.
- Does it integrate with DealCloud or our CRM?
- No. There is no integration with DealCloud, Affinity, Allvue or any deal CRM. The notes are files, so moving a summary into your CRM is a copy and paste that a person does.
- What does it cost to run a deal on it?
- Nothing, if the local features cover you. The free plan does on-device transcription with no meeting cap, includes the MCP server, and picks up meetings from your local Apple Calendar. Pro at $5.00 a month or $54.00 a year adds Google and Outlook sync, hosted AI models, fast cross-meeting chat, Obsidian sync and speaker identification.
Record the management call without adding a party to the NDA
Free on a Mac with Apple Silicon, no cap on meetings. Pro is $5.00 a month or $54.00 a year.
Record your next diligence call