Radical Reads

Earlier this month we officially announced our investment in OffDeal, which is building the world’s first AI-native investment bank. 

Small businesses drive 45% of the US GDP, but as owners retire thousands of these businesses face closure. Today, acquiring small businesses is incredibly time consuming and challenging. Of the over two million SMBs in the US, many are servicing niche industries while the potential buyers of these companies have similarly bespoke acquisition criteria. With a heavy reliance on small business business brokers, there is currently no automated or scalable way to facilitate small business transactions. 

Historically, the best M&A advisory services were limited to large business. The very significant grunt work needed to provide the best advisory services has turned investment banking into a game of whale hunting, where banks chase the biggest companies. Experienced advisors have traditionally ignored small businesses, leaving the vast majority of entrepreneurs to fend for themselves.

By leveraging modern AI, OffDeal has streamlined the countless hours of analysis needed to find and evaluate small businesses. This allows advisors to focus on the human elements of their work: cultivating relationships, deeply understanding their client’s needs, and delivering personalized strategic guidance.

OffDeal uses AI in three distinct ways: (i) employing LLMs to index the entire SMB landscape into structured, queryable datasets – which has helped OffDeal create the world’s largest proprietary dataset of more than 2 million SMBs; (ii) deploying its proprietary algorithm to rank and sort thousands of potential targets, identifying the most relevant matches; and (iii) utilizing agents to enrich all of their datasets by studying all publicly available qualitative data, such as company websites, reviews, and more. 

These technological breakthroughs make it possible for OffDeal to serve hundreds of thousands of small business owners who are typically overlooked and left to fend for themselves by Wall Street’s advisory services, providing critical support during one of the most significant business transactions of their lives.

By leveraging AI on their backend, OffDeal’s advisors can focus on providing the best services to their clients, and can focus on the human-to-human relationships that are so important in these life changing transactions. Our belief is that OffDeal will represent the first of many AI-native services firms that leverage AI to not just make us more productive, but allow us to be more human.