How do you find off-market companies to acquire? A Grata workflow, from a one-line thesis to a warm intro.

Most acquirers find off-market companies the slow way: a keyword search, a list of a few hundred names, and weeks of manual triage to work out which owners might sell and whether anyone at the firm has a way in. A connected AI workflow collapses that into one session. You describe the company you want to buy in plain English, and you get back a ranked, filtered list of targets, scored with proprietary intelligence on how likely each owner is to sell, with your firm's warmest path to each one already attached.

The workflow below runs in Claude with two connectors switched on: Grata, a private market intelligence provider, with verified coverage on companies other tools miss, and Affinity, which knows who at your firm has already talked to them. Grata finds the company while Affinity finds the intro. Each step is one plain-language prompt with the parameters in brackets, so you can copy it and change what's in the brackets to fit your thesis. The full sequence sits at the end, ready to run in order.

How do you turn a thesis into a target list?

Start with the thesis. You don't need a company name or a SIC code, just a description of the opportunity, and the model maps the territory from there.

I want to take advantage of [the rising demand for data center builds]. Using Grata, walk me through the relevant sub-verticals around [data center infrastructure and construction], tell me which are most interesting, and why.

Claude leverages Grata's data set—including private, exclusive, and proprietary data it can't access on its own—to map the sub-verticals with granularity and surface critical market activity it'd otherwise miss. You're now looking at the shape of a market instead of a list of search hits. Change the bracketed thesis to point the same prompt at any theme you're chasing.

How do you narrow to the companies that fit?

Layer your real criteria on in a second prompt. This is where a purpose-built intelligence layer earns its place: you can filter to ownership type and geography that a generic search can't see.

Let's look at [critical power]. Pull a list of [critical power services] firms with experience on [specialty builds like data centers]. Focus on bootstrapped companies, and narrow to those headquartered in [the top five US states for data center build activity].


Bootstrapped is the operative word. Founder-owned companies with no institutional capital are the ones where a first conversation can still turn into a proprietary deal, and they're exactly the companies that never show up in a funding-round feed.

How do you know which owners are ready to sell?

A list of good companies is not a list of good deals. The difference is intent, and Grata scores it.

From these companies, rank them by Grata's seller intent score.


Grata's proprietary Seller Intent score measures the likelihood a company is actively preparing to transact. By monitoring aggregated, anonymized patterns at scale, it's able to flag early opportunities 6-12 months before they reach the market. You spend your outreach on the owners leaning toward a transaction instead of cold-calling the whole set.

"These are bootstrapped companies, so there are no signals on the surface. Grata has real data on their research activity in real time — whether they're looking up M&A topics, engaging with advisors or sponsors — that tells us who's likely to come to market in the next 6 to 12 months." — Nevin Raj, GM and co-founder, Grata

How do you find a warm introduction?

This is the step a standalone search can't do, because the answer lives inside your own firm. With Affinity connected, the same chat looks inward.

Now check our Affinity CRM against these companies. Do we have any warm connections?


Affinity captures every email and meeting across your firm automatically, so it can see relationships no one thought to log. In the demo it surfaced a warm path into one of the highest-intent targets through a colleague who'd been in contact months earlier. That's the whole game: the right company and a door that's already open.

Then close the loop without switching tools.

Draft an outreach email to [that contact], referencing our prior conversation.


Affinity drafts it against the full history of the relationship, so the note references the real prior conversation rather than reading like a cold template.

What you end up with

Five prompts, one chat, and a path from "here's a theme I like" to "here's a warm email to the owner most likely to sell." The market half comes from Grata; the relationship half comes from Affinity; and because the two connect directly, the search result and your firm's history sit in the same place. You never export a list or dig through inboxes to find the connection.

"Grata is a stable data layer: clean, well-resolved company data. Affinity is a relationship layer on top of it. Connect the two through MCP and a target list becomes a prioritized, relationship-mapped pipeline." — Jesse Lott, CCO, Affinity

The full workflow, copy and run

Here is the whole sequence in order. Copy each step into the AI assistant your firm uses, with Grata connected throughout and Affinity connected for the last two. Change what's in the brackets to fit your thesis.

1. Turn a thesis into a market map

I want to take advantage of [the rising demand for data center builds]. Using Grata, walk me through the relevant sub-verticals around [data center infrastructure and construction], tell me which are most interesting, and why.


2. Narrow to the companies that fit

Let's look at [critical power]. Pull a list of [critical power services] firms with experience on [specialty builds like data centers]. Focus on bootstrapped companies, and narrow to those headquartered in [the top five US states for data center build activity].


3. Rank by who's ready to sell

From these companies, rank them by Grata's seller intent score.


4. Find your warm path in (Affinity connected)

Now check our Affinity CRM against these companies. Do we have any warm connections?


5. Draft the outreach (Affinity connected)

Draft an outreach email to [that contact], referencing our prior conversation.


The warm-path step only works with your own deals connected

The last two prompts read your firm's own relationship history, and that is the Affinity MCP: every email and meeting your team has logged, connected to the AI assistant you already use, so a target list turns into a set of warm introductions instead of cold calls. To get started with Affinity MCP, follow our step-by-step guide here.

More AI workflows across the deal lifecycle

This is one stage of a four-part series on connecting AI to where your firm's work already lives.

• Start here: Putting AI to work across the private capital deal lifecycle—the full thesis and all four workflows
• Diligence (AlphaSense): How do you use AI for due diligence?
• Sourcing (Crunchbase): How do you find emerging startups before they raise?
• Monitoring (Lumonic): How do you monitor a private credit portfolio?

FAQ

How do you find off-market companies to acquire?
Describe the type of company you want in plain language rather than searching a keyword. A sourcing tool like Grata maps the sub-verticals, filters to your criteria (ownership, geography, size), and scores each company by how likely the owner is to sell. Connecting your CRM to the same workflow then surfaces which targets your firm already has a relationship with.

What is a seller intent score?
It's a proprietary score, unique to Grata, of how likely a company's owner is to be receptive to a sale, by monitoring active signals that tend to precede a transaction, like general M&A research or engagement with banks, advisors, and potential acquirers. It lets an acquirer prioritize outreach toward owners who are already investigating a deal.

Why focus on bootstrapped companies for proprietary deals?
Founder-owned companies without institutional investors are more likely to entertain a direct, first-time conversation, but are difficult for most tools to capture. That makes them a common source of proprietary, off-market deals.

How does a CRM help with off-market sourcing?
A CRM that captures relationship history automatically can show which target companies someone at your firm has already been in contact with, turning a cold list into a set of warm introductions. Affinity does this by logging emails and meetings across the firm without manual entry.

How do investors source proprietary deals?
Proprietary deals come from reaching a company before it runs a competitive process, which usually means finding off-market, often founder-owned companies and getting to them through a relationship rather than a cold approach. A sourcing tool surfaces and scores those companies by how likely the owner is to sell, and a CRM that captures your firm's relationship history shows which ones you already have a warm path to.