Soal Labs started by sitting with the deal team to map how an opportunity actually moves through the firm and where the bottlenecks sat on the credit and equity sides. That shaped a deliberately thin first slice: ingest a CIM, extract the deal's shape, run it through a basic screening checklist, and draft a pre-screening memo. The structured deal database was built in parallel so every extraction was stored from day one rather than retrofitted later, and by the end of month one the firm could run a real deal end to end. The next three months expanded the system in three directions: the rest of the memo lifecycle, from refined screening through investment committee; a validation layer of business rules to catch bad extractions; and a workflow layer for stage routing and audit trails. The order was intentional — memos first because that was where analysts spent their time, validation second because trust in extractions had to be earned, and workflow last. Throughout, the team kept the deal team in the build loop on a weekly cadence.