New: Data room

A new module is available in vemix as of today: the data room. Use it to run a virtual data room for a company sale, a funding round or an investment, where bidders, investors and their advisors can view documents but never take them – and where you can see who read what, when and for how long.

Why a data room, and why now

To be honest, this module was not meant for the public at first. We built it for our own needs: anyone who holds investments and occasionally sells one knows the routine – NDA by email, a data room at a provider that charges per project, bidder questions in Excel lists, the access log in yet another system. None of it knows anything about the contacts in the CRM or the mandate agreement that was signed two weeks earlier.

While building it, it became clear that this exact chain – contact, mandate, NDA, project, data room, fee – is the everyday work of M&A advisors and corporate finance boutiques, and that vemix already covers every step of it. Only the part that is about confidentiality used to live outside. That is why the module is now available to everyone – and why there is a dedicated solution page for M&A advisors.

Financial planning, which we announced in the last post, remains the next big topic. It has not been cancelled; it has merely been overtaken once more.

View it, never take it

An external viewer never receives the original document. vemix renders every page server-side into an image and delivers only that – there is no download, no print and no PDF in the bidder’s browser. Every page delivered carries a watermark with the viewer’s email address, the name of the data room and a timestamp. It is mandatory and cannot be switched off; if you do not want it, you do not want a data room.

What we deliberately do not claim: that screenshots can be prevented. No provider can do that, even if some hint at it. Anyone who sees an image can photograph it. The module therefore promises exactly three things – the original is technically out of reach, every visible page can be attributed to a person, and every access is logged. A disabled context menu and an intercepted Ctrl+P come on top, but as a convenience against accidents, not as a security boundary.

Bidder groups that know nothing of each other

Several parties work in the same data room without seeing each other. A group learns neither that others exist nor what they are allowed to see – not even through side channels such as search hits, counters or an error message that confirms a document which, for them, does not exist. Even the sign-in does not reveal to outsiders who is involved in a process.

You set permissions per group and folder, subfolders inherit, and individual documents can deviate. On top of that comes phased release: you prepare the material for the second round in advance, and as soon as you promote a group, it sees everything – without anyone touching a rule. Before you open, you check every view with “Preview as group”: the same view the bidder will get later, not a replica.

No account for bidders

External members need neither a vemix account nor a licence. They sign in with their email address and a six-digit one-time code; the invitation arrives by email as soon as you open the data room – not before, so nobody clicks a link that still leads nowhere. If you revoke access or move a member to another group, it takes effect immediately, even on a running session.

The portal carries your logo, your colour and your footer, and it speaks the member’s language: interface, template folder names, emails and watermarks are available throughout in German and English.

Questions inside the data room instead of by email

Bidders ask their questions where the document is – referencing a folder or file, numbered per group. Your team assigns them, sets priority and due date, discusses in internal notes that stay invisible to the outside, and answers traceably with a full history. An answer that concerns everyone is released anonymously as an FAQ – each one individually, never automatically. Anyone receiving many messages in a short time gets one digest email instead of twenty.

The log is the result

For the seller, the report on bidder engagement is one of the most important outcomes of a data room. That is why the access log records not only who signed in, but which document was opened, which pages were viewed for how long and what was searched for – filterable per group and exportable as CSV. Changes to permissions, phases and members also land in the audit log.

Search is there too, as in the other modules: internally through global search, in the portal across the content the group is allowed to see. Hits are page-exact and jump straight into the viewer.

Why it lives inside vemix

A data room on its own is a folder with a watermark. In vemix it is the last step of a chain: the NDA goes out through digital signatures before the invitation, the mandate agreement sits in contract management, bidders and investors are in the CRM, the transaction is a project with booked hours, and the fee is invoiced from that same project. Nothing is entered twice – and several processes run side by side without anything leaking between them.

Availability and what comes next

The module is available to all new tenants, including the free trial. Existing tenants can have it enabled on request – a short message is enough. It works on its own; the connection to signatures, contracts and CRM is the added value, not a prerequisite.

On the list for the data room are an engagement dashboard with dwell time per group and folder, a daily digest of new documents and a closing archive with originals, index and log as a ZIP. The next big topic remains financial planning. We will keep you posted here – and keep listening.