An AI-native acquisition assistant, and the things it will not pretend to do.
It reads the documents, traces every figure to its page, prices the business across several methods with the weights shown, and tells you what does not tie. It does not find you deals, and it does not tell you a business is a good buy.
What it does not do, first
It does not find you deals. It does not tell you a business is a good buy. It does not claim an accuracy percentage, because a valuation is a range of defensible opinions rather than a fact with an error bar, and any vendor quoting you a single accuracy figure is describing a test they designed.
It also does not decide the two things that move a valuation most: which method deserves the most weight for this business, and whether the business is really the owner. It shows you both and makes you choose.
What it does, and why that is the useful part
It reads the documents. Accounts, management figures, payroll, the add-back schedule, and it records the page and line each figure came from. That last part is the difference between a number you can check and a number you have to believe.
It then prices the business across several methods at once and shows the weights, so you can see which method is doing the work and disagree with that one specifically rather than with the total.
And it says what does not tie. Gross profit that does not reconcile, a margin that moves without an explanation, an owner salary missing from the add-backs. Extraction that only reports success is the half that gets a valuation wrong quietly.
What AI-native means here
Not a chat box bolted onto a spreadsheet. The reading, the pricing and the questions are one system, so asking why the discounted cash flow is above the comparables gets an answer from your valuation, naming the assumption driving it, rather than a general explanation of the method.
It means the same documents serve the valuation and the diligence that follows, instead of being uploaded twice into two tools that disagree.
A firm, not only a product
The software is the visible half. The other half is that we are building a firm on it: the kind of advisory house that has always existed for large transactions, rebuilt from the first day on the tools that now exist. The large investment banks were assembled around analysts, models and data rooms. We start from the assistant that does the reading, the rebuilding and the first pass at pricing, and we put the people where judgement is actually needed.
That changes who can afford advice. An owner selling a business with six million in revenue has never had a banker on their side of the table, because the fee did not cover the hours. A searcher screening forty targets could not pay for forty analyst weeks. When the assistant does the hours, the firm can afford to show up for both of them, and to charge for the decision rather than for the time.
We are explicit about what that firm is for. It is not a broker, it takes no success fee, and it does not sit on one side of the deal. It is the instrument both sides read, with people behind it who will say what the number is, what it is not, and what they would do next. The ambition is the reach of a bulge-bracket house at a cost the private market can carry, which the old structure could never offer to a business this size.
Where the people stay
Quality of earnings, legal and tax, the negotiation, and the judgement about whether you want to run this business. We are explicit about that boundary because the alternative is a product that is confident in exactly the places it should not be.
Questions
- Can AI value a business?
- It can apply the standard methods to the figures far faster than a person, and show its working. What it cannot do is decide which method deserves the most weight for this particular business, or judge whether the owner is the business. Those are the parts that move a valuation most, and they are judgement.
- What does an AI acquisition assistant actually do?
- Reads the documents and pulls the figures out with the page each came from, checks whether they tie to each other, prices the business across several methods with the weights shown, and answers questions about why the number is what it is.
- Is this a replacement for an accountant or a broker?
- No, and a valuation company saying otherwise would be selling you something it cannot deliver. It replaces the first two weeks: the reading, the rebuilding of a profit figure, and the first pass at a price. A quality of earnings review, a legal opinion and a negotiation are still work for people.
- How do I know the numbers are right?
- Every figure records the document and the page it came from, and every method shows how it got to its answer. That is the only honest form of trust in this: not a claimed accuracy percentage, but working you can check.
- Does it find deals for me?
- No. Sourcing is a different job and we do not do it. It prices and tracks the targets you bring.
We sell this, so the section on what it does not do is the one worth holding us to.