M&A Buyer Scoring Engine
The Problem
On any sell-side mandate, the buyer list is the single most important deliverable — and it's still built manually. Analysts spend days combing through databases, cross-referencing deal histories, checking sector fit, and guessing at appetite. The output is a static Excel sheet that's outdated the moment it's built. Senior bankers review it, push back, and the cycle repeats.
The real cost isn't the analyst hours. It's the deals that slip because the right buyer was ranked 40th on a list of 200 and never got a call.
What We Built
A scoring engine that takes a live mandate — target company profile, sector, financials, deal parameters — and ranks potential buyers against multiple fit signals automatically.
For each buyer, the system generates:
- •A composite fit score based on sector alignment, check-size fit, deal history, strategic rationale, and execution complexity
- •A plain-language explanation of why the buyer ranks where it does — not a black-box number, but a narrative an MD can read and challenge
- •Flagged watchouts — gaps in financial data, valuation mismatches, or execution risks that would surface during diligence anyway
- •A recommended next action — whether to prioritize outreach, hold until more data is available, or deprioritize
- •A tailored outreach angle — built from the target's actual financials, growth profile, and the buyer's known preferences
- •Full deal history — prior transactions with deal values, multiples paid, and deal types, pulled and structured automatically
The system is built for the sell-side workflow: it doesn't replace the banker's judgment, it gives them a ranked, reasoned starting point instead of a blank spreadsheet.
How It Works
Feed in the target company profile and mandate parameters. The engine scores your buyer universe, ranks them, and outputs a prioritized shortlist with deal histories, outreach angles, and risk flags — ready for MD review. What typically takes an analyst team a week of database pulls and manual cross-referencing is reduced to hours.
See It in Action
Scored buyer shortlist for an India-based pharma sell-side mandate, with Everstone Capital ranked as a top buyer — including the full reasoning chain, watchouts, outreach angle, and historical deal comps at ~12.66x EV/EBITDA.