BackBuysiders Institute

Sourcing and dealflow

Buysiders InstituteRead time: 8 minutes

Finding companies and transactions: screening, market maps and the deal marketplace.

Sourcing is where the platform turns from studying capital to finding somewhere to put it. It covers the company universe, the tools for cutting it, and the surfaces where transactions are posted rather than discovered.

Screening the company universe

Sourcing holds private and startup companies with the fields you would screen on: sector, geography, stage, funding raised and last round. The job of a screen is to get from a universe nobody can read to a list a human can work through, and the fields exist to serve that narrowing rather than to be comprehensive.

A screen is only as honest as its coverage. Company data is deepest where filings are public and thinnest for private companies that have never raised, which is precisely where proprietary sourcing still beats any platform.

Market maps

A market map is a sector cut into its segments with the companies placed inside them. Its use is orientation rather than discovery: before you can judge whether a target is well positioned, you need to know who else is standing in the same square.

The deal marketplace and advisors

Deal Marketplace is where transactions are posted rather than dug out. Advisors covers the intermediaries who run processes, split by discipline: investment banks, lawyers and accountants. For a buyer the advisor record is a sourcing surface in its own right, because deals arrive through the people who run them long before they arrive anywhere else.

Matchmaking, and what to expect from it

AI Deals Matchmaking proposes deals against a stated mandate. Treat it as a first-pass filter that widens what you see, not as a judgement. It is good at surfacing the thing you would not have screened for and poor at knowing which of your constraints are real.

← Back to BoardroomGo deeper with Membership →