deal-sourcing
(11)
PropRise
PropRise is a San Francisco AI company (YC S23) building software for institutional commercial real estate teams. Its two live products, Primer and Beacon, automate the Excel-heavy grind of dealmaking: Primer turns offering memos, rent rolls and T-12s into underwriting models with every number cited back to its source, while Beacon scans roughly 450,000 U.S. trade areas to surface self-storage sites that match a firm's buy-box. Founded by ex-Stripe machine-learning and engineering leads, PropRise is used by teams behind $50B+ in CRE, including Bain Capital, Colliers and Public Storage.
Axial
Axial is a private deal network for the North American lower middle market, connecting business owners, M&A advisors, private equity firms, lenders and corporate acquirers to source, market and close transactions confidentially. Founded in 2010 by Peter Lehrman, the platform uses matching algorithms and CRM-style tools to privately introduce sell-side deals to relevant buyers, and its 20,000+ members have transacted more than $25 billion across 2,000+ closed deals.
Capsa AI
Capsa AI is a London- and New York-based startup building an 'AI operating system' for private capital. Its platform indexes a firm's fragmented institutional knowledge - deal memos, emails, CRM notes and documents - and layers agentic AI across the fund lifecycle, from sourcing and due diligence to portfolio monitoring and back-office work. Founded in 2023 by Danyal Ozduzenciler and Callum Downie, the company raised an $18M Series A in June 2026 (about $20M total) to help private equity and private credit firms move faster and surface insights with full source traceability.
Peter Lehrman
Peter Lehrman is the founder and CEO of Axial, a New York based online platform where owners of small and lower middle market private companies meet buyers, lenders and financial sponsors. He also hosts the Masters in Small Business M&A podcast. Before Axial, he was on the founding team of Gerson Lehrman Group and worked in private equity at SFW Capital Partners.
Louisa AI
Louisa AI is a New York-based relationship intelligence platform, spun out of Goldman Sachs in 2023, that maps who-knows-who and who-knows-what inside an organization. By reading daily market news against a firm's internal relationship graph, it proactively nudges the right colleague with the right warm lead at the right time - what founder Rohan Doctor calls 'systematizing serendipity.' It sells mainly to investment banks, private capital, consulting and law firms as a cross-sell and deal-origination engine.
FounderNest
FounderNest is an AI-native market intelligence platform that helps innovation teams at large corporations, CVCs, R&D, M&A and strategy groups discover, evaluate and track emerging startups, technologies and trends. Its AI Market Intelligence Analyst (AMIA) scans 50M+ companies, 160M+ patents and billions of data points to surface opportunities faster than traditional research.
Harmonic
Harmonic is a startup discovery engine built for venture investors, corporate development teams, and go-to-market professionals. It aggregates and continuously refreshes structured and unstructured data on more than 30 million companies and 190 million people, then lets users run granular, multi-criteria searches and AI-powered research to find promising startups before anyone else does. Founded in 2020 and now headquartered in New York, the company positions itself as 'the source of truth for startups.'
Rogo
Rogo is a generative AI platform purpose-built for finance. Founded in 2021 by three former junior bankers, it trains finance-specific models and deploys autonomous AI agents - including its flagship agent Felix - to handle the slow, repetitive work of investment banking, private equity, and hedge funds: searching filings, building comparable-company analyses, drafting investment memos, generating Excel models, and running data-room diligence. More than 35,000 finance professionals at 250+ institutions use it, and a $160M Series D in April 2026 valued the company at roughly $2 billion.
Max Ruderman
Max Ruderman is the CEO of Harmonic, a New York-based data company building what he calls 'the source of truth for startups.' A former Google engineer who turned to entrepreneurship after a jiu-jitsu injury sidelined him, Ruderman helped grow Harmonic from a tool that scraped Delaware corporate filings into a real-time startup database used by investors at Floodgate, Craft Ventures, a16z, Accel, and companies like Brex, Notion, and Carta. He started as COO and became CEO, steering the company toward AI-driven sourcing with an investment agent built on LangGraph.
Ali Dastjerdi
Ali Dastjerdi is the co-founder and CEO of Raylu, a New York AI company that turns an investor's thesis into booked founder meetings in minutes instead of weeks. A Harvard machine-learning student turned Insight Partners investor, he started Raylu in 2022 with his freshman-year roommate and a friend they met at AWS. The trio raised a $4M seed and an $8M Series A, and now sell their 'Deal Engineering' platform to 45-plus funds managing over $500 billion. They keep one unopened beer in the office fridge, to be drunk only the day the company dies.
Eric Norman
Eric Norman is a General Partner at Pioneer Fund, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm that pools resources from 500+ Y Combinator alumni to back top-performing YC startups. A former hardware founder himself - he built and led Cinder Precision Cooker through Y Combinator - Norman brings firsthand operator experience to his investing, with recent portfolio activity in AI identity, healthcare AI, and enterprise tooling.