For your team · Deal Room
M&A / Investment Deals · PE, VC & Corporate Dev
Buy companies in a live market: diligence the deal of the week, bid against rival funds or negotiate with the owner, then sell what you bought.
Deal Room puts students on the buy side of a live market. Every active day the inbox brings 1-5 deal emails (the same emails for every team), staged through the season the way a fund's work runs: banker pitches and sourcing calls early, negotiation moments and close mechanics mid-sim, integration problems and portfolio or LP questions late, with diligence findings and valuation fights in every deal week. Every week but the last, one company comes to market for the whole class with a deal card and a true value nobody sees. That week's diligence and valuation emails are its deal file: sound calls uncover hidden problems and sharpen each team's own estimate. On the week's last day, odd weeks run a sealed-bid auction against the other teams and one outside bidder (the winner's curse is real: the most optimistic estimate tends to win), and even weeks bring an off-market deal each team negotiates with the owner after filing a walk-away price and its BATNA, against a floor the engine hides and enforces. What a fund buys it holds: integration calls move its value, and problems diligence missed come back after close as surprises. In the final week everything is sold, and the Final Report walks each deal from the price paid to the proceeds, with the fund's MOIC, IRR and DPI. Memos are graded by a senior-partner LLM that also sits as an Investment Committee with a memory of the team's earlier positions. Three lenses: Private Equity, Venture Capital and Corporate Dev, each with its own fund page, dry powder, emails and seven targets.
The Fund Score is the plain average of the four pillars and the one number on the leaderboard, scorecard, final report and gradebook. Each pillar's calls half grades every answer against the options the team had (best available option 100, weakest 0, a memo its 0-10 grade × 10, a missed email 0), severity-weighted and starting from two neutral 50s. Once a deal week has closed, Valuation Accuracy, Negotiation and Returns become 50% calls and 50% deal results: bid and walk-away accuracy against true value (overpaying costs more than underbidding), share of the bargaining zone kept (walking with no zone scores 100; breaking your own walk-away costs 30), and the fund's multiple (1.0x = 40, 1.5x = 80 out of 100). A student's suggested grade is 70% Fund Score + 30% their own work (25 points memo quality: their average memo grade, counted at n/(n+5) for n graded and the team's memo average for the rest; 5 points answering their share of the team's emails on time); once any team in the class claims a role, that is 80% of the grade and role credit the other 20% (half owned work each week: emails the student's role owns, and for the Deal Lead the week's bid or offer; half weekly Investment Committee reflections of 40+ words).
Half grades on pricing calls, half how close the team's bids and walk-away prices came to each company's true value.
Half grades on price, structure, terms and closing calls, half the share of the bargaining zone the team kept in off-market deals.
Grades on what the team investigates and does with what it finds; what it misses costs it at the exit.
Half grades on integration and portfolio calls, half the fund's multiple on the capital it invested.
One target per week for the whole class, with a hidden true value drawn per class. The week's diligence and valuation emails are its deal file: sound calls uncover problems and narrow each team's range.
Teams bid price and structure (cash, earnout, seller note) against each other and one outside bidder. Teams that win the most auctions by overbidding end with worse returns than disciplined bidders.
Off-market deals: file a walk-away price and BATNA, then three offers against an owner whose floor the engine enforces. Scored on the share of the bargaining zone kept.
Every holding is sold in the final week. The Final Report walks each deal from price paid through operating improvement, post-close surprises and the exit market to proceeds, with MOIC, IRR and DPI.
The senior-partner memo grader sees the team's earlier memos and deal record, including the BATNA it filed before each off-market table, and calls out unexplained contradictions.
Three roles: Deal Lead (valuation, negotiation and closing emails, plus the week's bid or offer), Diligence Lead (sourcing and diligence emails) and Portfolio & LP Lead (portfolio, LP and integration emails). The inbox marks each email "For:" its owner, each student writes a weekly Investment Committee reflection, and the professor reads them all on one page.
One sim day per active day: 25 on the 5-week format (four deals), 40 on 8-week and 70 on a semester (seven deals), Mon-Fri at 3 emails a day by default. The professor can change the number of days.
Designed for ~15-30 students in teams of 4-5. Each team runs one fund, splits three light roles, and competes for the same deals.
MBA private equity / venture capital electives, M&A and corporate development courses, negotiation and finance capstones.
Students sit on the buy side of a live market: they bid against each other for the same companies, negotiate against a hidden reservation price, own what they buy and sell it at the end, so price, diligence and discipline show up in real returns.
One of many pre-authored prompts from the sim’s Week 1 debrieflibrary. Grounded in the team’s actual decisions and used as a scheduled teaching moment.
Week 1 debriefThe banker pitch you took seriously
A banker pitched at least one deal to your team this week. Which one did you engage on, and which did you pass on inside 30 minutes? What signal in the teaser separated the two — sector fit, seller quality, or valuation anchor?
A single in-tray event drawn from the sim’s live event catalog — the kind of decision a student team sees in their inbox on any given active day.
I have an interesting opportunity that fits your thesis — a $40M-revenue specialty manufacturer. EBITDA $7M, growing 12%. Owner ready to sell. Not yet shopped widely. Want a meeting?
Canvas, Blackboard, Brightspace, Moodle via LTI 1.3. Students launch from your LMS with single sign-on; one-click grade publish posts scores back with the rubric breakdown as the comment.
Per semester. No platform fee, no per-section charge, no seat minimums. Institutional invoicing available.