Deal Sourcing Tools: How to Source M&A and Investment Deals

Deal flow is a data problem before it's a relationship problem: you can only pursue the targets you know about. This guide covers what deal sourcing tools do, the data they run on, a practical data-driven sourcing workflow, and how to do it affordably.

What is deal sourcing?

Deal sourcing (or deal origination) is the process of finding and evaluating potential acquisitions or investments before they hit a banker's process. Increasingly it's data-driven: instead of waiting for inbound, teams proactively screen the market against a thesis and build outbound target lists.

The data you need

• Company data — firmographics to filter by sector, size, geography and growth.
• M&A data — who's acquiring in the space, and at what pace (consolidation signals).
• Funding data — recent raises signal momentum, runway and investor conviction.
• Investor data — map who backs the space and find co-investors.
• Contacts — the people to reach once a target is prioritised.

Acquirezy has all five as connected datasets, which is the point — sourcing lives at the intersections.

Data also tells you where to look. In Acquirezy's 203Kacquisitions, deal activity concentrates in a few sectors — Software (31,637 deals), Manufacturing (27,921), Information Technology (23,641) and Health Care (18,086) — and the most active buyers are insurance consolidators and PE roll-ups (Gallagher has made 524 acquisitions; CVC, Riverside, EQT and Advent each 230+). If you're sourcing add-ons, those are the acquirers to track and the sectors where roll-ups are already happening.

A practical data-driven sourcing workflow

1. Define the thesis — sector, revenue/size proxy, geography, growth or funding signals.
2. Screen the market — filter 5.4M companies across 100+ columns to that profile.
3. Layer in activity — overlay 200K+ acquisitions and 700K+ funding rounds to spot consolidation and momentum.
4. Prioritise — rank by fit and signals; use Chase AI to summarise a sector or compare acquirers.
5. Export & act — export the target list to CSV (or your CRM) and pull the contacts to start outreach.

Deal sourcing tools compared

Sourcing deals with Acquirezy

Acquirezy is built for this workflow: screen 5.4M companies, overlay M&A and funding, use the PE M&A intelligence workspace to filter deals by firm, sector, year and size, then export your target list — all self-serve, from $29/month on Intelligence. For teams that want to run their own scoring, Bulk Dataset Exportdelivers the raw datasets to your warehouse.