In DevelopmentAI Platform

AI Acquisition Hunter

An AI acquisition-intelligence platform that surfaces and scores off-market acquisition targets from public business signals.

Acquisition Hunter landing page with hero "Find off-market businesses before they hit the market" and a numbered how-it-works workflow from acquisition thesis to deal pipeline. — Acquisition Hunter landing page

What it solves

Acquisition teams burn heavy analyst time hunting off-market targets, and the signals that suggest a business might sell — aging ownership, review decay, digital neglect, hiring slowdowns, legal filings — sit scattered across dozens of public sources. By the time a business becomes a brokered deal, competitors already know about it.

Built for Private equity firms, family offices, search funds, strategic acquirers, holding companies, roll-up operators, independent sponsors, and M&A sourcing teams.

Overview

AI Acquisition Hunter discovers businesses worth acquiring before they hit the market. Users search by geography and industry to get a ranked list of acquisition opportunities, then open company profiles that aggregate public business, review, website/SEO, hiring, and legal signals into transparent, explainable scores — acquisition readiness, distress, succession risk, modernization upside, market position, timing, and confidence. Each target gets an AI-generated acquisition thesis grounded only in stored signals, plus saved-target pipelines, alerts, and boardroom-ready PDF/CSV reports. Careful, probabilistic language and source citations keep it compliant and non-defamatory.

What this demonstrates

The system is a multi-source intelligence pipeline: provider adapters normalize and deduplicate business data, a weighted entity-resolution engine matches companies across sources, and append-only snapshot tables preserve signal and score history with versioning. Scoring is transparent and rules-based with per-score explanations and supporting/opposing signals, background enrichment runs on a Redis-backed queue, and an AI thesis generator is constrained to cited signals without hallucinating facts. Auth includes org-scoped RBAC and TOTP two-factor.

What makes it different

This is not a generic lead database. It is a predictive acquisition intelligence system that finds off-market targets before they appear on the market.

Scoring over raw dataThe core value is scoring, timing, prioritization, and thesis generation, not the underlying data.
Append-only historyNever overwrite historical snapshots; scoring and signals use append-only history.
Every signal has a sourceEach score carries a timestamp; each thesis carries model and scoring version.
Explainable scoresNo black-box scores; users click any score to see why it was assigned.
Probabilistic, responsible languagePublic and licensed data only; confidence levels and source timestamps shown.
Verified vs inferredTheses distinguish verified facts, inferred signals, confidence, and missing data.

Core capabilities · 16

Business Discovery Engine
Find companies by city, state, zip, radius, industry, or keyword across 25 industry presets.
Entity Resolution Engine
Match the same company across sources using weighted name, address, phone, domain, and ID matching.
Review Intelligence Layer
Track rating trends, review velocity decay, sentiment, and owner response drop-off over time.
Website & Digital Weakness Layer
Detect outdated CMS, poor page speed, weak SEO, and missing conversion funnels as modernization upside.
Hiring & Workforce Signal Layer
Read job posting trends, hiring silence, and public layoff signals from workforce data.
Legal, Filing & Public Risk Layer
Surface entity status, lawsuits, liens, and bankruptcy indicators labeled by verification level.
Succession Risk Layer
Estimate ownership transition risk from business age, founder tenure, and succession visibility.
Competitor & Market Comparison
Compare a company against local competitors on reviews, SEO, website quality, and category visibility.
Scoring Engine
Produce transparent 0-100 scores with explanations, supporting and opposing signals, and versioning.
AI Acquisition Thesis Generator
Write an analyst-grade thesis with positive signals, risks, seller angle, and missing data.
Search, Filters & Ranking
Filter and sort targets by geography, size, and every score dimension for fast sourcing.
Saved Targets & Pipeline
Manage targets through stages from New Target to Contacted with notes and outreach tracking.
Alerts & Monitoring
Notify on score increases, review spikes, legal signals, and new theses for watched companies.
Reports & Exporting
Generate boardroom-ready company PDFs, CSVs, market reports, and thesis exports with citations.
Admin & Data Source Management
Manage provider registry, import logs, retries, source freshness, and cost tracking.
Modular Provider Adapters
Integrate discovery, firmographic, review, digital, hiring, and legal data sources through adapters.

How it works

Select a city, zip, state, or market
Select an industry and filters
View a ranked list of acquisition opportunities
Open a company profile
Read the acquisition intelligence report
Save the company to a pipeline
Export or generate an outreach thesis
Track the company over time

How the score works

Composite Opportunity Score

Acquisition Readiness Score
How likely the business is to entertain an acquisition conversation.
Distress Signal Score
Operational, financial, reputational, legal, or workforce stress indicators.
Succession Risk Score
Aging ownership, long-tenured leadership, or limited visible succession.
Modernization Upside Score
Value an acquirer could create from digital and operational gaps.
Market Position Score
Competitive standing in the local market versus competitors.
Timing Score
Whether recent signal acceleration makes now a good time to reach out.
Confidence Score
How much reliable, fresh, agreeing data supports the thesis.

Key screens

DashboardTop acquisition opportunities at a glance.
SearchGeography and industry sourcing with advanced filters.
CompaniesCompany profiles with scores, signals, and thesis.
MarketsMarket-level comparison and saturation.
Saved TargetsShortlisted companies.
PipelineAcquisition target workflow by stage.
ReportsExportable company and market reports.
Data SourcesProvider health, imports, and freshness.
SettingsOrganization, roles, and preferences.

Data model

Company
CompanyLocation
Industry
Market
BusinessListing
Review
ReviewSnapshot
WebsiteSnapshot
SeoSnapshot
HiringSnapshot
LegalSignal
FilingRecord
ManagementSignal
CompetitorSnapshot
ScoreSnapshot
AcquisitionThesis
SavedTarget
Pipeline
PipelineStage
OutreachNote
DataSourceRun
SourceCitation
AuditLog

Screens · 5

Acquisition Hunter platform features section listing eight capability cards including regional business search, acquisition scoring, AI company reports, and pipeline workflow. — Platform features grid

Acquisition Hunter dashboard command center for a demo workspace with zeroed metrics for companies discovered, active markets, saved profiles, and pipeline items, plus a getting-started guide. — Empty acquisition dashboard

Acquisition search screen with fields for city, industry, radius, and acquisition persona, a notice that the built-in mock provider is in use, and an empty results state. — Acquisition search, no results yet

Acquisition Hunter data sources page showing provider cards grouped by category with status badges: mock provider and Google Places included, others marked coming soon or locked. — Data source providers

Acquisition Hunter workspace settings on the Organization tab, with organization name and workspace ID fields and a team members table listing one owner. — Workspace organization settings

How it is built

A separate Express/Node backend and Next.js frontend. The backend uses Prisma over PostgreSQL, JWT authentication with TOTP 2FA, and a BullMQ/Redis queue for background enrichment and report jobs. External data providers (Google Places, PageSpeed Insights, and others) sit behind adapters with deterministic mock fallbacks; Anthropic Claude generates acquisition theses; Stripe handles billing. The stack is containerized with Docker.