Earlier this year, CAPTARGET joined SourceCo. I want to write directly to anyone who's been part of the CAPTARGET story over the last fifteen years, and to anyone arriving here for the first time, about what this combination actually is and why it matters.

The short version: the platform you've known as CAPTARGET continues to operate under the same name, same team, same model, same San Diego office, with me continuing as CEO.

You can alsoo read my personal LinkedIn announcement here.

What's changed is the infrastructure underneath. CAPTARGET is now part of a combined platform that brings together fifteen years of accumulated sourcing data and the AI-driven deployment infrastructure SourceCo has spent three years building. That combination, in this category, is structurally rare. The rest of this post is about why.

The structural argument

Tom Mughan, who founded SourceCo in 2022 and is now my partner in this business, articulates the underlying thesis cleanly:

‍"Origination is basically lead generation. How private equity investment banks originate leads is highly outdated."

That's the simple version of what most firms in our category have been slow to internalize. Deal sourcing, at scale, is fundamentally a lead-generation discipline. The firms that figured out modern lead-generation tooling first will own the next phase of the category. The firms that didn't will be acquired, will combine, or will quietly fade.

The structural problem is that doing this well requires two things that most firms have one of, not both. The first is accumulated proprietary sourcing data: years of owner conversations, intermediary relationships, outcome tracking on the businesses you've approached, signal patterns across the deals that closed and the ones that stalled. The second is the deployment infrastructure to apply current AI tooling to that data at scale: the engineering, the workflow, the calling integration, the data warehouse architecture.

CAPTARGET had the first. SourceCo had the second. The combination produces something neither company could have produced alone in any reasonable timeframe.

How CAPTARGET got here

The original conversation that became CAPTARGET happened at a hotel bar in Vegas during the Final Four, sometime around 2009. I was at MGM looking at a deal with my eventual co-founder Paul Saitowitz, and Paul said something like:

I could probably do the work I'm doing for three or four investment banks at the same time and nobody would know.

That offhand comment turned into a fractional analyst service that turned, over the next few years, into a deal sourcing service that turned, eventually, into CAPTARGET.

Most of what we built wasn't strategic in any deliberate sense.

We sent emails on MailChimp until they banned us. We were a CapIQ back office until they kicked us out for redistributing data. We coined the term "deal origination" for our service category mostly because we couldn't afford to bid against established buy-side firms on the keywords they were already buying. The early work was Excel-driven email farms with laptops in conference rooms running macros to test name-format combinations. We built the infrastructure to do email deliverability and contact verification ourselves, years before there were vendors selling that work as services.

Over fifteen years, CAPTARGET has worked with more than 1,500 PE funds and sourced over $8 billion in closed deal volume for clients across more than 50 industries. In the last twelve months alone, the team sourced 7,843 qualified leads. The firm built the longest continuous track record in the middle market for fee-for-service sourcing.

Why I sold to Tom specifically

CAPTARGET went through two prior PE processes that fell apart. Both ended the same way: the buyers were looking at EBITDA, and we weren't maximizing EBITDA. We were maximizing the data and the relationships, and the buyers couldn't see why that mattered.

Tom got it immediately. The first conversation we had on the phone, after a back-and-forth on r/privateequity where we were both arguing about origination under handles neither of us had bothered to anonymize fully, lasted about two hours. By the end of it I had a sense of what he was trying to build. By the next call, I told him he should buy CAPTARGET. He booked a flight to San Diego five minutes later, which is consistent with a principle Tom himself articulates about deals: the people who book flights fastest are usually the best at closing.

What Tom understood, that no other potential acquirer fully understood, was that CAPTARGET's value was the data layer underneath the service, not the EBITDA the service produced. Tom characterized what he saw with characteristic directness:

‍"CAPTARGET stayed ahead of the curve on technology for a long time, and that was what originally set you apart. Maybe as you spent less time working on it, you fell a little behind."

He wasn't wrong, and the candor about it was part of why the deal worked.

He wanted the data. I wanted to spend the next chapter of my career running a fund (Verde Equity Partners) and backing operators rather than running a services business day-to-day. The structure works for both of us. I continue as CEO of CAPTARGET, the team stays intact, the model continues, and Tom and his team handle the platform integration we hadn't been able to build standalone.

What's not changing

If you're a CAPTARGET client reading this, what matters most is operational continuity. Your retainer wires the same amount on the same date to the same entity. Your account lead is your account lead. Your contract remains in effect, with no addenda or re-papering required. Your campaigns continue running under your firm's brand. The flat-retainer, no-success-fee model continues exactly as it has. No success fee will ever appear on a closing statement for a deal sourced through your CAPTARGET engagement.

The model has been CAPTARGET's structural moat for fifteen years, not because it was a marketing position but because it removes a class of conflict-of-interest that fee-based sourcing structurally creates. If three CAPTARGET clients are looking for similar deals and CAPTARGET takes a buy-side fee, the client paying the largest fee sees the deal first. That math is structural, and the only way to remove it is to remove the variable comp. We did that fifteen years ago and have no intention of changing it.

What is changing

Two operational changes you'll see if you're a CAPTARGET client.

First, calling. CAPTARGET's outbound calling team operates in-house under SourceCo's calling infrastructure, a US-based, full-time team. Every call placed on a campaign is reviewed and scored across nine specific dimensions including opening, objection handling, and closing. The CRM updates from call transcripts automatically, which means campaign reporting captures every owner conversation in full. Over the course of a campaign, the script adjusts based on what worked on previous calls.

Second, target lists. Target lists are now built from the union of CAPTARGET's fifteen years of accumulated sourcing data and SourceCo's three years of accumulated sourcing data. The training base behind the targeting work expanded by a multiple of what either firm operated on alone. Practically, this means lists arrive pre-filtered against a more complete picture of which signals matter in which industries, which means the work of getting from a 200-line list to the 50 worth approaching takes less time.

The combined platform also operates across the full economic spectrum of buy-side deal origination. GP Partners (success-fee only, no retainer, selective mandates) at one end. SourceCo (hybrid retainer plus success fee, working with institutional buyers running active acquisition programs) in the middle. CAPTARGET (flat retainer, no success fee, 1,500+ PE funds across fifteen years of relationship history) at the other end. A buyer can self-select the structure that fits their mandate, or engage multiple parts of the platform across different acquisition objectives. No other firm in this category covers all three economic structures under one roof.

Where the category is going

Approximately 25,000 professional acquirers compete in the US deal origination market today, by my estimate, up from roughly 3,000 in 2005. Aggregate deal supply has not grown at the same rate. The practical effect is that every meaningful target now reaches the inboxes of dozens of buyers within a short window of any process going to market. Off-market access matters more now than it did when most current sourcing playbooks were written.

The deal-origination services category is at the early stage of consolidation. Firms that have neither accumulated proprietary data nor deployed AI infrastructure should expect to combine, get acquired, or quietly fade over the next 24 months. Firms that have both will own the decade ahead. SourceCo's acquisition of CAPTARGET is the first move in that consolidation. It will not be the last.

What's next

I continue as CEO of CAPTARGET while spending an increasing share of my time at Verde Equity Partners, the lower-middle-market private equity fund I founded with my partners. Verde exists to back operators executing roll-up strategies in property and field services, which is its own story for another time. CAPTARGET's combination with SourceCo is what makes that focus possible.

Thank you to the clients, intermediaries, team members, and operators who built CAPTARGET into what it is. The combination is the next chapter, not a departure from what came before.