Sourcescrub finds the companies that haven’t made the headlines

Consider the exhibitor list. It is the sort of document you open to find a booth number, then abandon. Somewhere in its alphabetical procession of suppliers and specialists may be a business an investor would love to buy. The company has customers. It has employees. It has paid to be at the show. What it may never have had is a funding announcement.

Sourcescrub made that discrepancy its business. An enterprise can be conspicuous to its own industry and almost invisible to someone searching for acquisition targets. The trick is knowing which records to read, then doing enough work on them to make the names useful.

A booth before a balance sheet

The origin is pleasingly practical. In 2014, Tyler Fair was building the business development department at Serent Capital. He needed information on bootstrapped companies and trained research analysts to assemble it. He later joined forces with Prescott Nasser, a childhood friend who also had investment banking experience. Sourcescrub dates its formation to 2015.

The founders’ observation was about when information appeared. A transaction creates records that researchers can follow. A business that has never raised outside capital or changed hands can leave a thinner trail in transaction-focused research. Yet it may appear in a buyers’ guide, an association directory or a conference roster. Sourcescrub began organizing those other trails.

“There was a huge data gap in and around bootstrapped companies.”

Tyler Fair · Co-founder

This is a useful distinction for anyone studying a market. A company need not be newly founded to be newly discovered. Nor does absence from a familiar list establish that the business is small, uninteresting or dormant. It may simply mean the list was assembled for a different purpose.

Sourcescrub’s expertise sits in that gap: connecting fragmented evidence about private businesses to the questions investment professionals ask. The company sells the ability to work through the evidence repeatedly, across markets, without rebuilding the research operation for every new thesis.

The list was doing too much work

LFM Capital’s experience supplies a concrete picture of the old routine. In a published case study, the firm described employing up to ten college interns each semester for research. One assignment involved downloading a list of 100,000 companies from Hoovers and working through it by industry code. There was plenty of information. Getting a relevant answer out of it consumed people’s time.

The same case study reports a 200% increase in directly sourced opportunities and 2.5 times the productivity after the firm changed its approach with Sourcescrub. Those are customer results presented by the vendor, rather than a controlled experiment. Their practical interest is the workflow they describe: less effort combing lists, more capacity to pursue businesses that fit.

Here, the first thing to strain was manual screening. Adding more names meant adding more work. A platform that preserves the connection between a company and its industry sources can make that pile easier to interrogate: which businesses match the investment criteria, where can they be found, and what should the team investigate next?

Conference intelligence gives the idea a wonderfully tangible use. Before spending days walking an exhibition hall, a dealmaker can examine the companies associated with an event, apply the firm’s criteria and arrange conversations ahead of time. The ticket buys access to the room. The research helps decide whom to meet in it.

Humans inside the machine

Sourcescrub calls its method “Expert-in-the-loop” AI. Its published data process describes collection, structuring, cleansing, delivery and refresh. Crawlers and researchers gather information; analysts help interpret and label it; engineering makes it available through software and data connections. That division of labor is central to the product’s identity.

Think of the difference between retrieving a name and understanding a business. A name may refer to several organizations. An industry description may be broad enough to disguise a specialist. A growth estimate may be useful for screening while still requiring verification. The work of organizing these distinctions helps determine whether a search returns a sensible shortlist.

The advertised scale is substantial: the Sourcescrub homepage describes 17 million companies connected with more than 290,000 sources. These are the company’s own coverage figures. They should be read as a description of its searchable universe, without assuming that every company has equally detailed records.

In June 2023, Sourcescrub announced Sourcing GPT in customer beta. The described uses included exploring niche industries, finding similar businesses, building market maps and drafting outreach tied to developments such as hiring or conference participation. Generative AI made the interface more conversational. It still needed company data worth conversing about.

Buying back the research afternoon

For a private equity business development team, the platform can help assemble a market map and prioritize outreach. For corporate development, it can support a search for potential acquisitions. Investment bankers and consultants can use the same material to investigate sectors and organize company lists. Different customers bring different questions to the same underlying records.

The service extends beyond search. Custom scoring lets firms express their own criteria. Monitoring helps teams revisit targets as information changes. Executive contacts help turn research into a conversation. Custom research requests bring the data operations team into particular assignments, including proprietary requests the company says remain available only to the requesting team.

Delivery matters too. A discovered business has to enter the firm’s working system, where somebody owns the relationship. Sourcescrub offers CRM enrichment, API access and data delivery. The point is straightforward: useful information should reach the place where the next action happens, with less copying between screens.

Its commercial model is a B2B subscription. The published pricing page names Essentials, Plus and Professional tiers, differentiating capabilities and allowances such as scoring rules, research and exports. Pricing is handled through a sales conversation. A buyer therefore needs to compare the proposed contract with the work it would replace, including the time needed to integrate data and maintain a useful target list.

The surrounding market includes PitchBook, with company, transaction, investor and fund research, and Inven, which offers AI-assisted company discovery and market analysis. Their capabilities overlap. Sourcescrub’s distinctive emphasis is the connection between private companies and the industry sources where they appear. The sensible comparison is a test against a real research assignment.

When the customer buys the company

Mainsail Partners started using Sourcescrub in 2015. In November 2019, it became a growth equity investor. That sequence is unusually revealing: a firm had several years to observe the product before backing the business. Francisco Partners announced a further strategic growth investment in September 2021, with financial terms undisclosed.

Then came a larger combination. On August 8, 2025, Datasite announced its acquisition of Sourcescrub from Francisco Partners and said its data and capabilities would be integrated into Grata, another business it had acquired that year. Datasite itself had appeared in an earlier Sourcescrub customer case study.

The announcement connected the transaction to a $500 million investment commitment from CapVest, Datasite’s controlling shareholder, for a broader expansion of intelligence solutions. That figure describes the wider strategy; the announcement does not identify it as Sourcescrub’s purchase price.

There is a clear industrial logic to bringing these tools together: discovery data can sit closer to the technology used as deals progress. The integration is already visible to a visitor. In October 2026, selected Sourcescrub product routes lead to Grata, while the Sourcescrub homepage and pricing page remain accessible. Customers evaluating the service should establish which platform and capabilities their contract covers.

Borrow the method, keep the judgment

The transferable lesson is delightfully inexpensive. Start with the records an industry creates for itself. Define the kind of company you want to find. Keep the supporting evidence attached to each candidate. Check the shortlist, then record what you learn from actual conversations. A small team can borrow that routine even without buying an enterprise data platform.

The method depends on businesses leaving useful, observable traces. Where records are sparse or out of date, a precise-looking list may still miss important companies. A poor investment thesis can also produce a beautifully organized collection of irrelevant targets. Software makes a research process easier to repeat; the criteria still deserve scrutiny.

And finding a business does not establish its audited earnings, its owner’s willingness to sell or its merits as an investment. Those require further work. Sourcescrub’s appeal lies earlier in the sequence, when a team is deciding where to direct its attention. An exhibitor list is a modest document. Read properly, it can make the next conversation much less accidental.