Baton passes the baton.

A bakery owner is finally getting paid to leave.

Somewhere in America this morning, a sixty-something owner unlocked a shop for roughly the ten-thousandth time. The ovens still work. The regulars still come. The only thing missing is an exit. For decades the standard playbook was grim: hire a local broker, wait a year, answer the same questions forty times, and often just close the doors and walk away. Baton exists to make that last sentence obsolete.

Baton is an online marketplace where small business owners list, value and sell their companies - and where buyers go to find one worth running. It pairs software with M&A pros: data-backed valuations, confidential listings, digital data rooms, and a guided path to closing. The pitch on the homepage is refreshingly unromantic: "Sell your business with certainty."

The headline number that makes investors lean in: roughly 70% of Baton listings close. In a world where the traditional broker model is often quoted closing well under 10% of mandates, that is not a rounding error. It is the entire thesis.

The most analog corner of an analog market.

Real estate got Zillow. Used cars got Carvana. Stocks got an app on every phone. Main Street M&A got a fax machine. The market for buying and selling small businesses - the dry cleaner, the machine shop, the regional HVAC company - has stayed stubbornly opaque, slow and relationship-bound. Listings live in brokers' heads. Financials live in shoeboxes. Valuations take weeks and arrive as a number you're told to trust.

That opacity has a cost, and it's about to get expensive. An estimated $10 trillion in small business assets is expected to change hands over the next decade as baby boomers retire. Most of those owners have no succession plan. Many will close rather than sell, taking jobs and Main Street institutions down with them. The supply is enormous. The plumbing is broken.

Baton's founders kept noticing the same thing from different angles: the issue wasn't a shortage of buyers. It was a shortage of trust, structure and clean data between two parties who had every reason to do a deal and no good way to do it.

A grandfather closed his shop. That was the spark.

Co-founder Dylan Gans watched his grandfather wind down a business not because it failed, but because there was no clean way to sell it. Co-founder and CEO Chat Joglekar came at the same wound from the opposite end of his career: he'd built $100M+ businesses at Zillow, Spotify and Google, and he'd watched Zillow turn the most emotional transaction most families ever make - the home - into something searchable and legible. Along with co-founder Jamie Roth, they made a bet that the same playbook could work on Main Street.

The bet has a logical shape. If Zillow could put a defensible "Zestimate" on a house, a startup could put a defensible, data-backed valuation on a business. If a home buyer could browse listings with real photos and real numbers, a business buyer could browse confidential listings with real financials and even owner interview videos. The unglamorous magic isn't the marketplace alone - it's the trust layer underneath it.

Less broker theatre, more software.

Baton's product turns a year-long ordeal into a guided workflow. It starts with a free valuation - data-driven and finished in about a day, not the customary three weeks - with a QuickBooks integration that pulls financials automatically so nobody has to reconstruct three years of receipts by hand. From there, owners list publicly or keep a confidential, off-market profile to quietly test the market.

The business model is honest about its incentives. Valuations and listings are free. Paid tiers - roughly $500/month "lite" and $1,000/month "pro" - add support, and Baton takes about a 6% commission when a sale actually closes, with subscription payments credited back toward that fee. Baton mostly wins when the deal does.

Receipts, not just a pitch deck.

A 70% close rate is a great slide. It's a better argument when it has names attached. AHA! Leadership sold in about two and a half months and credited the weekly meetings and checklists. Greenway Painting closed a $1.85M sale and offered the kind of testimonial founders frame: "I'd recommend Baton for anyone without selling experience." A tech executive evaluating the platform called it "much more information-rich with greater depth" than the alternatives.

The cap table reads like a market endorsement too. The $10M Series A was led by Obvious Ventures, with FJ Labs, Fluent Ventures and Burst Capital, plus repeat backers Bloomberg Beta, Giant Ventures, Zeno Ventures and Divergent Capital. The name that travels furthest: Spencer Rascoff, Zillow's co-founder, betting on a founder explicitly trying to run the Zillow play on small businesses.

A QuickBooks integration handles the financial heavy lifting, and affiliations with brokerage and valuation bodies lend Baton's numbers outside credibility. The proof isn't one thing - it's the stack of small, boring, verifiable things that make a stranger comfortable wiring six or seven figures.

Make the exit as clear as the entrance.

Baton's mission is plain: make transferring ownership of a small business transparent, fast and fair, so owners get paid what they're owed and buyers can step in with confidence. The stakes are bigger than any single deal. Every business that closes for lack of a buyer is a Main Street institution that quietly disappears - jobs, lunch spots, the place that's been on the corner since before the owner's kids were born.

There's a tidy irony here. The least digital, most personal transaction in commerce - selling something you built by hand - turns out to be exactly the kind of problem software is good at, precisely because software can carry the trust that two strangers can't manufacture on their own. Baton isn't trying to remove the humans. It's trying to give them better tools and a clean place to meet.

Back to the bakery.

Return to that owner unlocking the shop. In the old story, the last chapter is a handwritten "Closed" sign and a lifetime of work evaporating. In Baton's version, the chapter is different: a data-backed valuation in a day, a confidential listing, a handful of vetted buyers, a guided close, and a check that reflects what the place is actually worth. The ovens keep running. Somebody new learns the regulars' orders.

That's the whole point of a baton. The race doesn't stop when one runner does - the handoff just has to be clean. With $10 trillion in small businesses about to change hands and most owners still without a plan, the company betting on a better handoff isn't chasing a niche. It's chasing the largest, quietest transfer of business ownership in a generation - one storefront at a time.