TL;DR

• Selling a small business is slow, manual, and structurally broken.
• AI-native platforms can compress timelines, lower costs, and rebuild SMB M&A by automating discovery, preparation, and diligence.

You’ve spent 30 years running a family HVAC business in Kansas. You know your customers by name, your kids grew up sweeping the shop floor, and you’ve finally decided it’s time to retire.

But when you start exploring how to sell, you’re hit with a flood of noise. Your inbox fills with hundreds of emails from “private equity firms” and “strategic buyers” who claim they’re interested in your business, but it’s impossible to tell who’s legitimate. If you’re like most owners, you try to sell on your own first. Quickly, frustration sets in: months of wasted time, endless calls, and no real progress.

The hardest part isn’t the work. It’s the uncertainty. Owners are asked to make irreversible decisions without ever feeling confident they’re seeing the full picture or dealing with real counterparts.

When you turn to a broker, the experience often isn’t much better. You get someone who feels more like a real estate agent than a financial advisor, charging large upfront fees and offering little transparency or support. Meanwhile, investment banks have long solved this problem for the Fortune 500, but they rarely touch the types of businesses that actually make up America. Nearly 45% of U.S. GDP runs on small businesses, yet this asset class remains non-institutionalized due to structural reasons.

A Market Hidden in Plain Sight

When I worked in investment banking, I saw firsthand how the model was built. Deals were bespoke, expensive, and endlessly manual. That machinery works for a $200M software company. But apply it to a $3M local business, and the gears grind to a halt. The math collapses.

That mismatch leaves a massive gap that is more than a nuisance. It leaves millions of small business owners without a real path to exit and buyers without an efficient way to find them.

Small businesses make up and employ nearly half the private workforce. We’re entering a historic ownership transition: over the next 10 years, roughly three-quarters of business owners plan to exit, putting an estimated $10 trillion in wealth into motion. Yet despite this looming transition wave, over 60% of family-owned businesses have no documented succession plan at all.

What’s left is a fragmented system: overwhelmed sellers, disorganized intermediaries, and buyers who can’t efficiently identify quality opportunities. The result isn’t just inefficiency; it’s a structural failure that locks up trillions in enterprise value.

A Perfect Storm of Supply, Demand, and Capability

Three powerful forces are colliding at once to unlock this overlooked market.

First, there is a record supply of businesses that are ready to be sold, driven by generational turnover in ownership.

Second, there is a growing class of modern acquirers, from search funds and solo capitalists to family offices, all actively seeking deal flow. At the same time, private equity is moving aggressively down-market.

Third, new technical capabilities make it possible to automate previously manual workflows, match buyers and sellers with precision, and compress time-to-close.

What was once too manual, too slow, and too expensive can now be reimagined as agentic infrastructure. This is not incremental tooling. It is a first principles redesign of the investment banking model.

An AI-Native Model for SMB M&A

The most important companies in this space will own the transaction system and run the full process. Deals close when a trusted party creates structure: the right materials, the right outreach, the right follow-up, and a clear path from interest to close.

In practice, that means compressing time-to-close by turning manual steps into productized workflows: generating seller materials quickly, structuring outreach, managing Q&A, and keeping diligence moving without constant human orchestration.

For a seller, this looks very different from the status quo. Instead of spending months assembling financials, responding to one-off requests, and guessing which inbound buyers are serious, preparation happens upfront and once. Materials are standardized, data is structured, and questions are answered in a shared system rather than buried in email threads.

For buyers, it means fewer blind processes. Rather than skimming dozens of inconsistent teaser decks or chasing brokers for follow-ups, they see comparable opportunities with clearer data, faster feedback loops, and a real sense of whether a deal is moving forward or quietly stalling.

The effect compounds. This will raise the quality of the market itself. Better information leads to better screening, fewer tire-kickers, and fewer dead-end processes. By improving trust and transparency, access expands so a $3M business can run a process that feels institutional.

What We Believe

To back this market, we hold a few core convictions:

The SMB M&A stack needs a true rebuild. What exists today wasn’t designed for this segment. It’s fragmented, manual, and optimized for people in the process, not outcomes for the people selling the business.

Workflow will beat headcount. The companies that win won’t just move transactions online but they’ll also compress the process end-to-end through AI-first systems.

Discovery and diligence are the choke points. Finding the right deal is hard. But closing it is often harder. The long tail of M&A breaks because sellers aren’t set up like institutional assets and the process punishes them for it. Whoever can reduce friction on both sides changes the market.

This market isn’t small. It’s just been unreachable. The long tail has stayed non-institutionalized not because it lacks value, but because the old model can’t profitably serve it. That’s starting to change.

Closing

For an owner, this is often the most consequential financial decision of their life. Speed matters, but trust is the wedge and the platform that wins won’t just move faster, it will make both sides feel confident they’re looking at the same truth.

A few years from now, it’ll feel strange that selling a small business required so much guesswork and so many handoffs. Not because the process became less human, but because AI finally streamlined the parts that never needed to be manual.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Views expressed represent the opinions of Jump Capital. Jump Capital may have investments in or pursue investments in the technology sectors and companies discussed. References to specific companies do not constitute investment recommendations.