Aura went from zero to $3.6M ARR inside Bain & Company in 18 months. The useful question is which constraints helped and which constraints slowed us down. Bain gave Aura distribution, trust, domain access, and customer proximity. It also added alignment work, incentive complexity, and speed limits a startup would not have had.
Built inside Bain & Company. PE due diligence platform from concept to revenue.
Customer development happened close to the people living the diligence workflow.
Bain funded development, with distribution and trust already present inside the setting.
Why consulting firms build products
Consulting firms have been building products for years, often quietly. The logic is simple: consulting revenue is linear (more hours equals more revenue) while product revenue can be exponential (build once, sell many times). The deeper reason is access. Consulting firms already sit close to decision-makers at large companies. They spend thousands of hours understanding customer problems at the highest levels. That access changes the first mile of product discovery. The translation cost from access to product is also real.
How Aura started
Aura was a PE due diligence platform. Bain runs hundreds of due diligence projects for private equity firms every year. Each project involves collecting massive amounts of data, running analyses, and producing reports under extreme time pressure. The existing process was artisanal. Consultants manually gathered data from dozens of sources, built one-off spreadsheets, spent nights reformatting slides. Each project reinvented the wheel.
The product idea was straightforward. Build a platform that systematizes this. Automate data collection. Standardize analyses. Make the repeatable parts instant so consultants can focus on the parts that actually require thinking. That is easy to say. Making it happen inside a consulting firm is hard for reasons that are not obvious from the outside.
The corporate venture trade-off
| What the firm gives you | What the firm costs you | |
|---|---|---|
| Distribution | Trusted access to enterprise buyers from day one. Go-to-market is 'walk down the hall.' | Slower decisions. Approvals route through partners with their own priorities. |
| Customer development | Unlimited access to partners who live the problem daily. Watch real projects, not interviews. | Conflicting incentive systems. Billable targets vs product adoption pull against each other. |
| Funding | Funded development. No raise, no dilution, no investor follow-ups. | Talent expectations shaped by consulting comp. Hard to attract startup engineers. |
| Brand | Trust by association. Skeptical PE firms open doors that startups would have to earn for years. | Brand risk. A failure in front of a client reflects on the firm. |
The disadvantages I underestimated
Four things made the work harder than the advantages would suggest.
What actually made it work
Three things were decisive. None of them was the product itself. The product mattered. The setting mattered more.
| What we did | What it bought us | |
|---|---|---|
| Executive air cover | Senior partners protected us from organizational gravity. When committees wanted oversight, they pushed back. | Space to actually build, instead of spending energy on internal survival |
| Revenue focus from day one | Treated as a business with revenue targets, ARR tracking, unit economics, not as innovation theater. | Internal credibility, plus the discipline to build something people would pay for |
| Borrowed conviction | Consultants who used early versions, partners who introduced us to clients, skeptics who asked hard questions. | Their credibility opened doors before we had earned our own. The skeptics improved the product. |
A corporate venture gets weak when it is funded for “innovation” rather than revenue. Once it is measured differently from a business, no one cares enough whether it succeeds.
The 18-month timeline
No big launch. Organic growth, one project at a time, with each success creating demand for the next.
Lessons for both sides
| If you are building inside a large org | If you are competing as a startup | |
|---|---|---|
| Choose the right problem | Look for problems where the org's existing assets (distribution, trust, access) are real advantages | Find buyers the big players have not yet noticed. New buyers emerge constantly. |
| Get air cover early | Find executives who believe in the mission. Without this you fight with one hand tied. | Speed is the advantage. Use it while you still have it. |
| Make revenue real | Structure success the same way as any other business. Innovation theater dies first. | Focus beats resources. Corporate ventures fight for attention internally. You only have to care about one thing. |
| Move faster than is comfortable | Default is caution. Push for speed while respecting real constraints. | Distribution can be built. Their relationships seem insurmountable. Markets expand. |
The honest conclusion
Building Aura inside Bain was one of the most educational experiences of my career. I learned things about product development, organizational dynamics, and enterprise sales that would have taken much longer to learn elsewhere.
