The credible answer to the portfolio AI question is one the fund does not write itself. A fund whose portfolio companies hold issued Statements answers with company-held evidence: each of those companies independently audited, under the framework its own regulator names it accountable for. The Statements belong to the companies, and what each shares is its own decision. Their existence is the fund's answer.
The AI governance question now reaches a fund from three directions at once. Limited partners ask it at the fund level: what is the portfolio's AI exposure, and how is it governed. Acquirers and late-stage leads ask it at exit: AI governance maturity is now diligenced, not assumed. And portfolio boards ask it in between, usually of a CEO who has an answer but nothing that proves the answer is right.
What most portfolios hold today is a policy and a template — an internal document, rolled down from the fund, self-assessed by the company it describes. That is an asserted position. None of the three parties asking the question accepts asserted positions anywhere else in their process.
The distance between "the portfolio has a policy" and "the portfolio can evidence its position" is the gap. A fund does not close it by aggregating its companies' self-assessments — it closes it through a mechanism in which qualifying companies are independently measured, to one evidence standard, and each holds the artefact that proves it.
kn0w is an independent audit of how AI actually runs inside a company. The method is what earns the word: the same measured questions are put to the CEO and to each function head — each answering independently, in separate sessions, heads in far greater depth — and the signed distance between the CEO's account of the business and what each function actually runs is the finding. No single respondent controls the output; that is what separates a measured position from a self-assessment. Each engagement produces a Statement: issued by KN0W PTE. LTD., date-stamped, carrying a unique four-part identifier and backed by a timestamped audit log — if anything in it changes after issue, that change is provable. That mechanism is the kn0w hallmark. No natural person signs it; no advisory relationship sits behind it.
The Statement records the company's CEO Visibility Gap — the signed, per-dimension distance between what the CEO believes the business runs and what each function actually runs, reported dimension by dimension and never as a single combined score — alongside a governance position mapped to the regulatory obligations that apply to that company — eleven frameworks across five regulators — and a benchmark placement against its true peers: same sector, same jurisdiction, same staff band, anonymised at a five-company floor.
The Statement is the company's own named result and belongs to the company. It is built to be submitted — to a board, to a regulator, into a diligence room. It is re-read annually: the Annual Statement re-establishes the company's position at each anniversary under the same hallmark and identifier structure.
The fund's role is a single introduction: a direct note to the portfolio CEOs whose companies fit the instrument — regulated FinTech and HealthTech, 50 to 200 staff, Australia and the United Kingdom. Each company decides for itself whether to proceed.
From there, every engagement is between kn0w and the company — the fund does not commission, direct, or sponsor it. The company commissions its own audit, signs its own Data Contribution Agreement naming KN0W PTE. LTD. as data controller, and gives around thirty minutes of its CEO's time and around an hour from each function head. The Statement issues four weeks from commission. Scheduling, sessions, scoring, and issuance run on kn0w's side — the portfolio team's involvement ends at the introduction.
There is no portfolio-wide contract, no fund-level onboarding, and nothing for the operating team to administer. Australian member data is held in AWS Sydney and UK member data in AWS London. SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certification are in progress via Vanta; neither is yet awarded. The controls they attest — regional isolation, encryption at rest and in transit, audit logging, automated deletion — are already operating, and residency and handling are documented at /security.
Three things are deliberately absent from this arrangement, and each is a condition of the Statement meaning anything.
The fund does not pay kn0w, and kn0w does not pay the fund. There are no referral economics in either direction — no commission, no rebate, no placement fee.
The fund does not influence the instrument. A company introduced by its investor is measured by the same six dimensions, the same locked weights, the same evidence standard, and the same issuance gate as a company that arrived cold. There is no fund view into scoring and no fund voice in it.
The fund does not hold the company's data. Each Statement is the company's own named result. What a company chooses to share with its board or its investors is the company's decision — the Statement is built to be submitted, and to whom is the holder's call. Where a company elects to share its Statement, the fund answers with company-held evidence; where it does not, the fund has no special access. There are no fund-level dashboards, no portfolio reporting, and no company-by-company access for investors.
The independence is not a policy position. It is the product. A portfolio of Statements is worth holding precisely because no one in the chain — not the fund, not kn0w's own commercial interest — could bend one.
When a company is asked in diligence to evidence its AI governance — and it increasingly is — the one that can table an issued Statement answers with evidence rather than narrative: independent, date-stamped, identifier-verified, benchmarked against its regulated peers, current to its last Annual Statement. The company that cannot table one answers with a policy document it wrote about itself.
Across a portfolio, the difference compounds quietly: every company holding a current Statement enters the next process with an independently issued, identifier-verified artefact on the table — not a gap to explain.
The first AI audit built to be submitted — commissioned by the company, issued to the company, and independent of everyone in between, including the investor who made the introduction.
The sample Statement includes the measurement framework and evidence standard applied at issuance.
Instrument scope: regulated FinTech and HealthTech, 50–200 staff, Australia and the United Kingdom.