Howdy folks 👋🏻 We’re Ori and Alston from OffDeal and we’re building an AI broker that helps individual buyers find and acquire small businesses.

tl;dr

Finding the right small business to acquire is painfully manual and tedious - an average buyer takes almost two years to buy one! 🫨

OffDeal puts SMB deal sourcing on autopilot. Our AI broker

• Screens through millions of SMBs using semantic search on dozens of data points to identify potential targets
• Automatically researches each one to ensure criteria match using custom AI web agents
• Crafts and sends hyper-personalized emails to maximize response rate

Since launching our closed beta two weeks ago, we have about a dozen buyers using OffDeal to source $10-50 million SMB acquisitions.

❌ Problem: Buying a small business takes 18-24 months

The current process of finding a small business to buy is painstakingly slow and tedious. Today, buyers rely on a combination of expensive SMB databases (e.g. Grata, Sourcescrub) and manual research, often involving a makeshift "deal team" of unpaid interns and offshore assistants.

This cobbled-together system creates a major bottleneck, typically allowing buyers to only assess 100-150 businesses per week (and that's considered good!). Since buyers usually need to go through ~10,000 businesses before finding “the one”, the entire process becomes incredibly time-consuming, frustrating, and expensive.

✨ Our Solution: AI Broker to find, diligence, and engage 10x more SMB targets

Our AI broker acts much like a human M&A advisor would - it finds targets, diligences them, and then reaches out to them on your behalf. However, unlike a human, our AI broker is powered by proprietary recommendation engines and custom-built AI agents and can do this for thousands of companies at a time 👀

Here is how it works:

Step 1. 🔎Preliminary target list

Our AI screens through millions of SMBs on dozens of data points using LLM-powered semantic search to uncover off-market hidden gems that match your exact acquisition criteria.

Step 2. 🧠 Offload tedious research

Our web-enabled AI agents conduct automated diligence, vetting thousands of companies to deliver a precision-targeted shortlist in minutes, not days.

Step 3.⚡Automate personalized outreach

Our AI uses dozens of data points to craft and send hundreds of hyper-personalized messages each week, helping you stand out from other buyers and fill your calendar with owner calls.

Our first customers

To start we’re focusing on “search funds”. These are individuals (typically MBAs from top programs) who raise money from institutional investors to acquire a small business.

This is an ideal first customer because:

1. They only have 2 years to find a business (or have to return capital)
2. 30% of searchers fail to find a deal within that timeframe
3. They are happy to pay finder fees for successful introductions
4. Ori personally knows dozens of them from his time at HBS and working in finance, making for a much easier GTM 🙂

Beyond search funds, we plan to expand to private equity firms, which buy thousands of SMBs each year, as well as to a rapidly growing number of individuals choosing to leave the rat race and pursue acquisition entrepreneurship.

🤝🏻Team

Ori Eldarov (CEO) first came across this problem in 2019 - when he attempted (unsuccessfully) to acquire a business. A couple of years later, he saw dozens of his classmates at HBS go through the same struggles.

Alston Lin (CTO) also struggled to find the right SMBs in the previous startup he founded - using existing tools that relied on broad industry buckets resulted in most outreach going to irrelevant businesses. However, with his experience working with big data and ranking engines at Facebook and Google, he knew he could build a better solution.

The Ask

If you or anyone you know is looking to acquire a small business ($10-50M) please introduce us! We can be reached at founders@offdeal.io or this form.

These can be any of the following:

• Individual buyers / “search funds”
• Lower middle market PE firms
• Companies looking to make an add-on acquisition

Thanks everyone for your support 🙂