We screen the full web for founder-associated, long-established, independently positioned businesses with an identifiable decision-maker and limited visible leadership bench. Every claim carries a verbatim quote and a source URL; nothing is inferred about anyone's private circumstances.
We operate several AI platforms and provide large-scale specialized datasets. Acquisition Universe applies that same infrastructure to acquisition screening — under stricter rules than the market usually tolerates.
Buyers pursuing ownership-transition theses get offered two bad options: vendors who claim to know things no website can support, or databases that carry no ownership evidence at all.
Some tools score private companies on supposed transaction likelihood. No public source supports those scores. A buyer who repeats them in an IC memo is repeating a guess.
Others assemble dossiers on the people behind companies — demographics, personal timelines, life-stage speculation. That is profiling private individuals, and we consider it off-limits.
Profile-based databases often carry an "ownership" column that is blank, stale, or unsourced. There is no quote to check, so there is nothing to defend when a partner asks.
This page exists because the distinction matters. The left column is screening. The right column is surveillance dressed up as screening.
Statements companies make about themselves, in public, on their own sites — captured verbatim with the source page.
Practices we decline on every engagement, at any price, because no website evidence can support them.
A screen that never over-claims can be quoted directly to an investment committee. When our report says "family owned and operated — third generation, About page", that sentence survives diligence, because the company itself wrote it. Claims that cannot survive contact with the target's own website have no place in a sourcing file.
We use one definition everywhere — on this page, in deliverables, and in the method documentation. It is deliberately narrow.
Founder-associated, long-established, independently positioned businesses with an identifiable decision-maker and limited visible leadership bench. Every element of that sentence is observable on a company website. No element requires knowing anything about a private person's plans.
A 10% component of the overall score, computed only from the definition above. It never contains intent, health, or life-event speculation — and it zeroes out entirely when evidence shows the company already belongs to a group.
Our full framework reads 15 website-visible signals per company. These five drive this use case — each with what we capture, and a real anonymized example of the evidence standard.
Read only from explicit site language. "Founder-led", "family-owned", "second generation" count; a family photo or an old-fashioned logo does not. Roughly half of confirmed industrial fits in our specimen runs carry this evidence explicitly.
How many principals does the site actually name? One named owner and an otherwise anonymous team reads differently from a six-person leadership page. We count what is published, and we never speculate about who else might exist off-site.
Stated founding year, continuity language, and independence claims. "Providing quality solutions since 1933" is a fact a company chose to publish. Long history plus continued independence is the backbone of the long-established test in our definition.
Named non-founder functions — finance, operations, HR — show how far a business runs beyond its principal. Thin professionalization alongside founder association sharpens transition context; deep benches soften it. Both readings come from the same published pages.
Parent-company footers, "a division of" lines, private-equity press pages. In our specimen work, about 1 in 10 keyword-perfect candidates was excluded as already group-owned. This signal zeroes the Transition Context score outright.
Strategic fit, recurring offerings, certifications, footprint, digital maturity and more complete the picture — documented in the method overview. Transition context is never read alone; it is 10% of a score dominated by mandate fit.
Leading company databases index the companies they found. We start from the entire active web and screen it against your written thesis — then re-run any subset on a custom ICP.
Three scores rank every confirmed fit. The weighting is deliberate: fit to your mandate dominates, and transition context refines the order rather than driving it.
Subsector, services, and customer types matched against your written thesis — the reason a company is on the list at all.
Whether an approach can land: an identifiable decision-maker, a live site, reachable contact paths.
The definition on this page, computed from published evidence only — and zeroed out the moment group ownership shows.
The rules below govern every succession-context deliverable we produce. They are commitments, not marketing copy.
Three anonymized entries from real specimen runs across industrial service categories. Note what each card contains — and what it conspicuously does not.
The honest comparison, including where each approach genuinely helps and where it cannot.
| Dimension | Full-web evidence screening (us) | Profile-based databases | Intent-flag vendors |
|---|---|---|---|
| Evidence source | Company's own published site, quoted verbatim | Aggregated registries and scraped profiles | Undisclosed models and proxies |
| Succession claim made | Context only, per our published definition | Ownership field, often unsourced | Transaction-likelihood scores |
| Verifiable by the buyer | Every claim, one click to the source | Rarely — no quote trail | No — the basis is proprietary |
| Personal data used | None | Sometimes appended | Frequently central to the product |
| Coverage of small independents | Full active web, 100M+ domains | Thins out below the database's radar | Limited to covered universe |
| Documented exclusions | Standard in every deliverable | Not offered | Not offered |
The score changes the order of effort, not the composition of the universe. A typical engagement runs like this.
We map every company matching the thesis — the census described in thesis universe mapping — then layer transition context onto confirmed fits. Context never adds companies; it only re-orders them.
Founder-associated, thin-bench independents move to the top of the outreach sequence. The evidence quotes double as honest personalization: openers that reference what the company says about itself, without pretending to know more.
Memos quote our evidence lines directly — "family owned and operated, About page" — with source URLs in the appendix. Nothing needs to be walked back later, because nothing was inferred.
Websites change: benches deepen, groups acquire, independence language disappears. Annual monitoring (from €18,000 per thesis) re-reads the universe; proof projects start at €4,900 and the full universe with deep shortlist from €9,900 — see pricing. Custom ICP re-runs are included.
Send us your thesis. We will show you — on a specimen slice — what website-visible succession context looks like when every line is quotable and nothing is inferred.