Redaction is not a formality. Customer contracts almost always carry a confidentiality clause that survives your fundraise, employment contracts and payroll files contain personal data you are the controller of under GDPR, and a term sheet from a previous round can hand a competing investor your entire negotiating position. Sharing them unredacted is the fastest way to turn a diligence request into a legal problem.
In practice, founders redact five categories. Named customers and logos where an NDA or a confidentiality clause applies. Individual compensation in payroll files, cap table side letters and employment agreements. Personal data of employees, advisors and pilot users — names, addresses, IDs, private email addresses. Banking and payment details on invoices and bank statements. And third-party commercial terms: unit pricing, rebates, exclusivity and MFN clauses that belong to the counterparty, not to you.
What you should not redact is the substance an investor needs to underwrite the round. Redacting your revenue concentration, your churn, or the actual size of your largest contract reads as evasion and costs you more time than it saves. The workable line is: hide the identity and the third-party terms, keep the economics. A contract shared as 'Customer A, EUR 240,000 ARR, 24-month term, auto-renew' answers the diligence question without breaching the NDA.
CAPLINK gives you three routes to that result. Keyword rules apply a term across every PDF in the room, which is the right tool for a customer name or a person that appears in a dozen documents. An AI review of a single document proposes candidates with a category and a page hint, so you can catch the bank account on page 14 of a scanned appendix that no keyword list would have covered. Manual marking handles the one-off passage: select it in the viewer and mark it. Every decision — an accepted suggestion, a keyword, a marked passage — is reversible from the redaction panel.
The enforcement happens on the server, not in the browser. When an investor or an advisor opens the document, CAPLINK regenerates the PDF with the matched characters removed from the file bytes, draws the blackout box, and applies the per-viewer watermark before the file is served. Copy-paste, text search and PDF inspection return nothing. If the engine cannot resolve a mark against the current version of the file, it refuses to serve the document rather than publishing one that only looks redacted. Founders and their team see the same document with the redacted passages highlighted instead of hidden, so you always know what the other side is missing.