OffDeal

Last year, I co-founded OffDeal, the world’s first VC-backed investment bank, and today I am excited to share that we have raised a $12M Series A led by Radical Ventures (bringing total funding to $17M). The journey, however, was far from linear. We started out by building an AI-powered deal sourcing platform for private equity buyers, but the SaaS fees made the TAM too small. Then we pivoted towards “deal sourcing as a service”; this actually worked, but we quickly realized that it was the small business owners that had a hair on fire problem. They had nowhere to turn when it came to the most important sale of their life. We had to make a hard decision: do we burn the boats, ignore all VC advice (to go after recurring revenues) and go all-in on a crazy idea of building an investment bank from scratch? The more we dug in, the more obvious it became - there was a massive opportunity to reconfigure what an investment bank could look like in a post-LLM world. So we went all in. Instead of selling AI SaaS to Goldman Sachs, we set out to build what Goldman would have looked like if it was started today, in 2025. Just over a year after pivoting, the results have exceeded our wildest expectations: - Over 30 deals launched - Delivered numerous multi-million dollar exits to our clients - Generated a deal pipeline of > $1B - Built a fully integrated AI stack to bring deals to market in < 1 week, instead the typical 4-8 weeks - Automations that increases banker throughput by 5x, to ~10 concurrent deals All with a scrappy team of only two engineers (and myself)! With this momentum, Radical Ventures, offered to double down on our mission and lead our Series A, less than a year after leading our Seed! We’re now planning on massively accelerating our growth and are hiring across all functions - Engineering, Investment Banking, Product, and more. If you’re interested in joining our journey, check out our careers page: https://offdeal.io/careers

Today, I’m excited to announce that OffDeal has raised a $12M Series A led by Radical Ventures to build the world’s first AI-native investment bank, bringing our total funding to $17M. Our Series A comes less than 10 months after we announced our Seed. Since then, our small, but mighty team has already launched over 30 sell-side M&A transactions, and has delivered numerous multi-million dollar exits to its clients. Wall Street's playbook works well, but only for billion-dollar deals - it breaks where most businesses actually exist. Traditional firms run oversized teams on outdated software, making smaller M&A transactions uneconomical. This leaves millions of small business owners with nowhere to turn for the most important sale of their lives… Until now. We’re building what Goldman Sachs would have looked like if it was built today - in 2025. Our engineers built software to automate analyst work with AI, so our in-house bankers can focus on dealmaking and delivering life-changing exits to our clients. Our mission is to democratize access to world-class investment banking services so that all entrepreneurs are able to realize the full value of their life’s work. Thank you to all of our investors who continue supporting us: Ryan Shannon (Radical Ventures) Nicolas Dessaigne (Y Combinator) Jared Heyman (Rebel Fund) Jonathan Kerstein & Abie J. Cohen (Centre Street Partners) We are also honored to welcome an amazing group of angels joining the round that include current and former execs of leading financial institutions such as Evercore, AllianceBernstein, McKinsey, as well as recognized tech leaders from Cognition, Rogo, Farther, Firsthand, Eight Sleep, Partiful, and many others. We’re scaling fast and hiring across all roles - if you or someone you know is interested in building the future of investment banking, we’d love to hear from you! Learn more about the OffDeal story in the Financial Times article linked below. Shoutout to Sujeet Indap for covering us!

🚨🚨🚨 NEW DEAL ALERT 🚨🚨🚨 We are excited to launch the sale of a high growth B2B Flooring Solutions Provider! This business is an authority on concrete-substrate beautification and protection, delivering polished concrete, epoxy coatings and moisture-mitigation systems. If you are interested, visit our listing below to access the teaser and request an NDA today! https://lnkd.in/euGiFGsN

🚨🚨🚨 NEW DEAL ALERT 🚨🚨🚨 OffDeal team has been busy! Launching our 3rd deal this week. We are excited to launch the sale of a C&D Waste Hauling Operator. This business is one of the  few fully licensed, independent operators within a major metropolitan area with multi-year contracts. If you are interested, visit our listing below to access the teaser and request an NDA today! https://lnkd.in/eMpBx5V6

🇺🇲 🦅 FOURTH DEAL THIS WEEK BEFORE JULY FOURTH 🦅 🇺🇲 We are excited to launch the sale of an asphalt paving & manufacturing platform. This company serves a mix of residential and commercial customers across West Texas and New Mexico, utilizing advanced materials such as hot mix asphalt recycled asphalt. If you are interested, visit our listing below to access the teaser and request an NDA today! https://lnkd.in/eaiWywj8

OffDeal team keeps growing! I'm excited to announce our latest hire, Jakob Deutsch, who is joining OffDeal as a Founding Software Engineer! Jakob brings an incredibly unique background to our team. Most recently, Jakob was a Senior Software Engineer at Coverdash, where he played a key role in architecting their embedded-insurance platform and the development of internal proprietary tools. His blend of deep software craftsmanship and practical business expertise will play a critical role in OffDeal’s product development. Please welcome Jakob to the OffDeal team!

Meta just executed the largest acquihire in history, paying $14.3B to hire Alexandr Wang and a select group of his top engineers. At first glance, this seems absurd, but Zuck’s track record with acquisitions speaks for itself: Without buying Instagram, WhatsApp, or Oculus, Facebook would be a dying company. From my own interactions with Alex and experience working at Meta, this move makes perfect sense. Meta is clearly struggling in the AI race, despite one of the world's largest GPU stockpiles and virtually infinite cash. COVID and remote work shifted Meta from its "move fast and break things" ethos to a bureaucracy, where building anything new requires approval from dozens of stakeholders. Middle managers now optimize for loss minimization rather than pursuing bold, asymmetric bets. The role of tech leads and managers has shifted dramatically; from leading the charge on building new, bold ideas to being a gatekeeper and saying "no". Consequently, all of the true builders I knew at Meta have left, leaving behind those promoted on the basis of their political skills instead of building capability. Contrast this with Alex, one of the best examples of "Founder Mode", maintaining a seed-stage startup mentality despite Scale AI’s ~1000 employees. He personally reviews every hire and steps in directly to solve critical problems, such as personally overseeing a sprint to resolve Meta’s data quality issues when Scale AI was at risk of losing them as a customer. Zuck clearly understands that bringing in external leadership is the only way Meta can have a shot in the AI race. He has known Alex for years, seeing his personal involvement in the product as a Scale AI customer, and is one of the only people he would trust. Excited to see how this plays out.

🚨HIRING INVESTMENT BANKERS!!! 🚨 We’re growing far faster than planned and need more 10× investment bankers to meet demand. Case study: Sam Mielke joined OffDeal four months ago. Today he’s running 8 exclusive sell-side mandates worth $3.8M in signed fees and another $14M in active pipeline. At his current clip he’s on pace to generate $10M+ in fees in his first year at OffDeal. At OffDeal we’re building what Goldman Sachs would look like if it launched today: an AI-native investment bank—not a marketplace—serving companies up to $100M in revenue. We give you cutting edge proprietary AI tools to supercharge your deal making along with a steady stream of businesses to help sell. We have a zero “meeting-about-meetings” culture—the work is 100% deal execution, valuation, buyer negotiation, and strategic advice (plus informing product roadmap). Comp → $100-150K base + % of every closed fee. We bring the mandates; you bring the craft. If you’re an ambitious early- or mid-career finance pro who’d rather shape the future than polish formatting, let’s talk. 👉  DM me if interested or apply below to join OffDeal - and if you know a great banker that might be a good fit, we’ll pay you a $10,000 referral bonus if they join.

Last year I set out to build a new investment bank, OffDeal. Not software for banks. Not a fintech marketplace. A real M&A advisory firm. When we were raising our $4.7 million seed, the most common pushback was, “Why not just sell software to Goldman Sachs?” Fair question: in our YC batch we were the only team building a service company. This essay explains why we chose the harder path—to build a full-stack AI investment bank to compete with the large incumbents, rather than sell SaaS directly to them.