What we’re building at Dealum: connecting startups with the companies that should be working with them

The first three posts were about the data. This one’s about what we think it means, and what we’re building at Dealum because of it.

Here’s the pattern we recognised. Of the funded companies we can see, only just over one in ten ever reaches an exit. Most of the money that went in is still tied up. And when an exit does come, it often arrives years after the last funding round, well after everyone had stopped paying attention.

The easy conclusion is that most startups just aren’t good enough to buy. We don’t think that’s right. We think they’ve simply not found the right buyer. The companies are there, and the buyers who’d value them are there too. They just have no reliable way of finding each other. That’s a distribution problem, not a quality one — and it’s the gap we’ve decided to close.

It’s also a bigger gap than the companies we’ve been writing about.

A quick note on the numbers. The 7,000 or so companies we’ve covered in this series are the funded ones: the businesses that raised a proper, priced round. We kept the analysis to that group on purpose, so every figure came from real data rather than a guess. But funded companies are the minority. Across the whole platform there are well over 150,000 companies: raised and unraised, early and long quiet, plenty that never fitted a venture funnel in the first place. And the number keeps growing every month.

This bigger group is what this post is about. Most of them will never raise a priced round or IPO, and the ones that did raise mostly won’t sell on the timeline a fund needs. But they’re real businesses, with real customers, real intellectual property and real teams.

Those companies are mostly mid-market operators. Post two made the case: businesses big enough to act and small enough to move quickly, sitting right next to a generation of startups they could be working with. Not only buying them. Working with them, in whatever way fits. That connection is what we think comes next.

For years, the exit conversation has been about IPOs and a handful of big acquirers, with everyone else queuing up behind them. That’s the world that produced the number we started this series with: of the funded startups in our data, only 11.4% ever reach an exit. We don't think the next wave looks like that. The next wave is companies dealing directly with the startups sitting quietly on platforms like ours — sometimes to partner, sometimes to buy, and a lot of things in between. Company to company, rather than fund to fund.

Dealum is already sitting on most of the pieces. The companies are here, well over 150,000 of them and climbing. The angel networks and their members are here. The tools to manage these conversations and move them forward are already built into the platform. What's been missing is the buyer side. Mid-market companies aren't on the platform yet, and there's nothing to connect them to the startups that are. That's what we're building: the door for those companies, and the matching behind it. As far as we can see, nobody else has all of these pieces in one place.

Here’s what it will look like from each side.

For a mid-market company, it’s access you haven’t really had before: a way into a pool of thousands of startups, filtered down to what you’re actually looking for. And that covers a lot of ground. Maybe you want a partner for an innovation challenge you can’t crack in-house. Maybe there’s a product or a piece of technology you’d license or bring in. Maybe it’s a team you’d hire, a company you’d buy outright, or a stake in something you value — which, from the other side of the table, is how an early investor finally gets their money back. Acquisition is one option among several, not the whole point.

The mechanics, as we’ve designed them, are simple. You tell us what you’re after and the companies that fit come to you, into your own pipeline, where you can look at them and make contact. No trawling, no scraping, no wading through a thousand profiles to find them.

For our investors — the angel networks and their members, who are the reason Dealum exists — this is the part that matters most. A lot of your money is sitting in companies that are doing fine but have nowhere obvious to go. No IPO coming, no big acquirer calling. Matching them with mid-market companies opens up other routes: someone who wants to partner, license or buy, or someone willing to buy out early investors who want out, without the company having to sell at all. Any of those gets you to liquidity sooner than waiting for an exit that, based on the numbers, probably isn’t coming.

We’re not going to pretend it’s all figured out. As we said in post three, no dataset can tell you which company is the right one to work with; that information just isn’t in there. What software can do is put the right companies in front of the right people, again and again, and let the people who know their own market decide. That’s the bit that’s been missing, and it’s the bit we can actually build.

We’re building it now, which means the first companies get a say in how it works.