Your edge is a thesis the auction market has not priced, worked proprietarily. We build the complete, evidenced universe behind that thesis for the price of a project, not a license.
Every sourcing tool worth having was priced for funds with management fees. You run on deal economics instead — and a data stack that consumes capital before a fee ever lands is a structural mistake, not a discipline problem.
Five figures a year, recurring, for a seat on the same index every fund in your vertical already queries. The subscription renews whether or not you close.
Worse: the coverage is a subset. Leading company databases index the companies they found — the profile-shaped part of the market — and your thesis lives partly outside it.
One engagement maps every company matching your thesis, starting from 100M+ classified domains — the entire active web — with quoted evidence for each inclusion and exclusion.
The deliverable is yours for the life of the thesis. Refresh it when you want deltas; re-run it when the angle sharpens. No renewal, no seat count, no per-user pricing conversation with a sales team.
The comparison your capital partners would draw themselves, laid out honestly — including the rows where a licensed seat genuinely wins.
| Decision factor | Licensed database seat | Project-priced universe |
|---|---|---|
| Cost shape | Recurring annual spend, pre-fee | One project from €4,900 |
| Coverage source | The vendor's index of found profiles | Every domain in the matching categories |
| Thesis fit | Firmographic filters approximate it | LLM screening against your written thesis |
| Evidence per name | Profile fields, provenance unclear | Quoted site language plus source URL |
| Who else works the list | Every subscriber with the same filters | You — universes are never shared |
| Ad-hoc single lookups | Instant, self-serve, genuinely useful | Not the model — this is census work |
| Workflow integration | Mature CRM plumbing built in | CSV built for CRM import |
Sponsors call deal flow proprietary when the seller conversation started away from a process. But the test sits upstream: where did the name come from? A filtered export four other buyers can reproduce fails that test on day one.
Full-web screening passes it structurally — thesis universe mapping applied to sponsor economics. Your universe is generated from your own thesis text, so no other buyer holds the same list, because no other buyer wrote the same thesis.
Our method extracts fifteen signals per company. These six do the heaviest lifting for sponsor sourcing — each captured as quoted site language, never inferred.
The sponsor's natural counterpart is an identifiable principal. We flag this only from explicit language — "founder-led", "second generation", "family-owned" — quoted with its source page. Roughly half of confirmed industrial fits carry the evidence openly.
About one in ten keyword-perfect candidates in our runs turns out to be group-owned — someone's platform, someone's add-on. Those score zero and land in the exclusion log before you spend a letter on a corp-dev inbox.
Service agreements, maintenance programs, scheduled visits, consumables. Your lenders will raise revenue durability in the first meeting; the deliverable arrives with the recurring-language evidence already extracted and quoted.
The principal score — 70% of the total — measures each company against your thesis as you wrote it, not against a firmographic proxy. If your angle turns on customer type or service mix, that is what gets scored.
"Serving the region since 1987" is a checkable extraction field, not a hope. Long-tenured independents are where sponsor economics work best, and stated history plus independence language is how we find them.
How many principals are actually named, and whether anyone beyond one or two people appears on the site. A thin visible bench shapes your management thesis and your first conversation — so we capture it per company.
We operate several AI platforms and provide large-scale specialized datasets — 300+ enterprise organisations run on our data, including one of Europe's largest telecom operators, adtech and cybersecurity platforms, and a leading airline metasearch.
LPs and lenders probe sourcing because it predicts everything downstream. "We license the same tools as everyone" is an answer; "we hold a complete evidenced census of our thesis, refreshed on a cadence" is a better one.
Every retained company carries verbatim quotes and source URLs. Every notable exclusion carries a reason. When a capital partner asks why a name is on the list — or off it — the memo writes itself.
The cadence is built for one operator and an analyst, not a sourcing department. Most proof projects land inside three weeks, with a same-day specimen up front so nothing is bought on faith.
A working session turns your angle into screenable criteria: subsectors, service model, geography, customer types — and the disqualifiers, which matter just as much. Your words become the scoring instrument.
Every domain in the matching categories is read and triaged. In one specimen run, a 25,000-domain US-focused sample resolved to roughly 17,300 live operating companies — directories, dead sites, and look-alikes removed.
Surviving candidates get the full 15-signal read: ownership evidence, service mix, certifications, footprint, bench visibility. Scores follow the 70/20/10 split — Mandate Fit, Outreach Suitability, Transition Context — zeroed on group ownership.
You receive the ranked CSV with quoted evidence per company, the exclusion log, and the counts that anchor a pipeline model: candidates screened, fits confirmed, exclusions documented. An analyst has verified the top of the ranking by hand before it ships.
Custom ICP re-runs are included when the thesis refines. When fee flow supports it, delta monitoring keeps the universe live — new entrants, ownership changes, offering shifts.
The quiet advantage: in mature sourcing markets, effort no longer differentiates — every team works hard. Coverage differentiates, because it is the one input most buyers still take on faith from the same few vendors.
Deal flow is proprietary when the target was identified from sources or criteria your competitors do not hold, and first contact happened outside any organized process. A thesis-specific census satisfies the first condition by construction.
Coverage is the share of genuinely existing, in-thesis companies your sourcing process can see. Databases report the numerator they hold; a census establishes the denominator — which is why the two produce such different pipeline math.
A composite drawn from real runs, anonymized per our standards — the shape of a sponsor engagement rather than a customer story. The numbers are genuine; the sponsor is a construction.
The sponsor's thesis was specific in ways no firmographic filter expresses: chemical service programs as the revenue spine, industrial and municipal customers, no equipment-only resellers, no group ownership. Two of those four criteria exist in no database schema.
Category triage separated live operating companies from distributors, directories, and consumer pool services — the look-alike traffic that fills keyword searches for this vertical.
221 eligible independent US water treatment companies survived deep extraction — with service-program language, footprint, and ownership evidence quoted per company.
A top decile with founder evidence like "Founded in 1982, the company is family owned and operated" — first letters drafted from each company's own words.
Four files, no dashboard to learn, no login to pay for. Everything is built to be worked in the tools you already run.
Every confirmed fit, scored 70/20/10, with the fifteen signal fields populated and the evidence quoted inline. Sortable, filterable, CRM-ready.
Names that looked right and were not — group-owned, wrong model, dormant — each with the disqualifying quote. Your team stops re-researching them.
Verbatim snippets with source URLs for every material claim, so any name can be verified in thirty seconds before a partner meeting.
Universe size, fit rate, exclusion rate, and coverage boundaries — the one-page denominator your LP materials have been missing.
Sponsors run on credibility, and so do we. The limits below are structural, and we would rather you hear them from us than discover them mid-mandate.
A deliverable that sits in a folder is a sunk cost. This one is structured to land in the three places sponsor work actually happens.
Column-stable CSV with scores, signals, and evidence fields — importable without transformation. Tier by score, assign owners, and start the top decile while the analysis is fresh. Pair it with a gap analysis to measure what your current stack missed.
First letters built on quoted site language — the certification they hold, the program they run, the year they were founded — read like homework, not mail merge. The evidence column is the drafting material, and response rates show the difference.
Universe counts, fit rates, and exclusion discipline drop straight into LP and lender memos. A sourcing section with a denominator reads differently from one with adjectives.
The questions below come from real scoping calls with independent sponsors — including the awkward ones about money and exclusivity that rarely make it onto vendor websites.
Yes, and most sponsors do. The proof project (from €4,900) covers one thesis end to end; the full universe with deep shortlist (from €9,900) and annual monitoring (from €18,000 per thesis) only make sense once you are working a live pipeline.
Nothing renews automatically. See pricing for what each tier contains.
Yours. Each engagement's thesis, scoring configuration, and output are confidential to the client, and we do not resell or recycle universes between engagements. Proprietary has to mean proprietary, or the premise of paying for coverage collapses.
Custom ICP re-runs on the delivered universe are included — a thesis pivot means a re-score, not a new invoice. If the pivot moves you into different industry categories entirely, we scope the incremental sweep honestly before anything runs.
Origination firms sell conversations; we sell the census those conversations should start from. There is no success fee, no exclusivity, and no incentive for us to steer you toward introducible targets. Some clients run both — the universe makes the origination retainer accountable.
Never. The screening reads public websites only; no company learns it was analyzed, and no signal of buy-side interest exists until you create one. For sponsors working quiet angles ahead of committed capital, that discretion is the point — the market should hear from you first, on your timing.
Niche is where the method outperforms. Subvertical counts in our specimen runs range from 702 eligible independents down to 93, and the narrow ones are exactly where databases go thin.
If triage shows the universe is too small to price fairly, we say so before you commit — a small honest census beats a padded one.
Send us the thesis you are working now — we will return a same-day specimen so you can judge the evidence quality before spending anything. If the coverage does not surprise you, the conversation costs nothing.