Finding niche targets reliably, with full ownership transparency
How the Corporate M&A team of an internationally active technology group found a more efficient way to research targets, understand ownership structures and build longlists, all from a single platform.
The essentials at a glance.
Most valuable
Longlist generation for deal sourcing
Company database with ownership structures
Hawkeye analyses for target deep-dives
Most frequently used
Company search and target lookup
Longlist creation for new market segments
Ownership and shareholder analysis
What works well
Highly intuitive, minimal learning curve
Accurate results, very few off-target hits
One platform instead of switching between multiple sources
A concise view of the case study.
StrategyBridgeAI in three words
Intuitive · Accurate · Comprehensive
The difference compared to before
Target research that previously required manual consolidation across multiple sources is now handled in one place, faster and with better coverage.
Most used and valuable modules / services
Company database and target lookup / Longlist creation / Hawkeye company analyses / Ownership and shareholder structures
The full story.
Initial Situation & Challenges
The company is an internationally active technology group with operations across multiple countries in Europe and beyond. With a portfolio of highly engineered components spanning multiple product segments and end markets, the group operates from numerous locations worldwide and serves customers in both consumer and commercial sectors.
The Corporate M&A team drives inorganic growth across geographies, with deal activity spanning core and adjacent product segments, including markets where coverage of smaller, often privately held companies is critical.
Before adopting StrategyBridgeAI, the team relied on an existing market intelligence tool alongside various databases and manual research. Information had to be gathered from different sources and consolidated by hand, which was time-consuming and hard to scale as the deal pipeline grew.
The main challenges were:
Relevant information had to be pulled from multiple sources and assembled by hand, with no unified workflow
The team’s deal focus is companies with €5-50M revenue, a range where many platforms fall short
Searching by company name rather than website URL often returned incomplete or ambiguous matches
Limited ownership transparency: parent and subsidiary structures were difficult to trace, especially for complex GmbH & Co. KG entities
Geographic gaps: coverage in Poland, Australia, and other non-core European markets was insufficient for the team’s international deal pipeline
Usage & Impact
Today, the Corporate M&A team uses StrategyBridgeAI as the central platform for target research, company analysis and deal origination. It replaces manual multi-source workflows with a single environment.
The team uses the platform primarily for searching and evaluating individual targets, building longlists for new market segments, and analyzing ownership structures to understand who is behind a company and whether a transaction context exists. The Hawkeye report has also been validated as a high-quality output for deeper target assessments.
The platform is used for:
Company lookup and target evaluation across European markets
Longlist creation for new acquisition segments and market screening
Ownership and beneficial owner analysis, including visualized structure charts
Hawkeye company analyses for competitive benchmarking and valuation prep
Transaction research to identify prior deal activity around targets
Impact in daily work
Impact in daily work:
Significantly more accurate search results, especially when using website URLs rather than company names
Parent-subsidiary structures and beneficial owners are now easy to access
Less manual effort overall, with one platform instead of switching between databases
More structured deal origination, with longlists and market analyses available when needed
Quotes
Those are exactly the three areas that matter in our day-to-day work: company search, market analysis, and longlist review. From a structural standpoint, it's really ideal.
Where other tools still give me completely off-target results, yours are already very close to the mark.
Very, very intuitive to use.
About the company
The interview partners are members of the Corporate M&A team of an internationally active technology group with roots in the German Mittelstand. The company operates across multiple divisions and serves customers globally, with production and sales locations across Europe and beyond. With a multi-decade history and a broad product portfolio spanning both consumer and industrial applications, the group has pursued active inorganic growth in recent years.
The Corporate M&A team is responsible for identifying, evaluating, and executing acquisitions across the group’s international business units. The team manages a shared target pipeline and works across both core and adjacent market segments, with a particular focus on smaller, often privately held companies with revenues in the low-to-mid double-digit million range.
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