We are a buy-side advisory firm.

Avise did not start as a product. It started as advisory work. We have run buy-side mandates for search funds, for private equity firms and for VC-backed startups buying their first company. A dozen and more of them, three quite different kinds of buyer, and the same small jobs underneath every one.

None of those jobs is difficult. Sending the NDA is not difficult. Sharing the teaser is not difficult. Finding the number of the person who introduced you is not difficult. Each takes fifteen or twenty minutes, there are several a day, and by Friday nobody on the mandate could say where the week had gone.

Every tool built for this market solves the interesting problem. The boring one is the accumulation: a spreadsheet, a CRM, a data room bought for one process, and a chat window that forgets. The teams we work with describe eleven to thirteen tools open at once. That is what costs a firm its capacity.

So we built the house we wanted for the mandates we were already running: the deal, its documents, its contacts, its follow-ups and its numbers in one place, where doing the small job is what keeps the record true. It made our own work easier, which is the entire reason it exists. Our own mandates went through it before there was a website or a price.

The mixed client base matters more than the count. Avise was never shaped around one firm’s workflow: a searcher screening inbound all week, a fund running three processes at once and a first-time acquirer with a board to answer to all had to be able to work in it. Anything that only suited one of them did not survive.

This is also the honest answer to the two questions we get most. Why not build it yourself in a chat window? We tried; it forgot everything two weeks later. Why trust a young company with your deal data? Our own deals were the first ones in it.