Arrive before
the round does.
By the time a company is obvious, the generous terms are gone. Origination is the discipline of being early — not occasionally, when someone has a free week, but continuously, across every category that extends your ecosystem.
Timing is not a detail. It is the whole return.
The same company, the same strategic logic, the same conviction — eighteen months apart — is two completely different assets. Origination is the only lever that moves that variable.
A view worth opening every morning.
Not a feed of news. A ranked, reasoned set of companies that are strategically relevant to you specifically, each with the case for attention already made.
Relevance, not popularity
Ranking reflects fit with your mandate — the categories, stages and geographies that genuinely extend what you already own.
The case, attached
Every candidate arrives with the reasoning for why it qualified, so you are reviewing a judgement rather than reconstructing one.
Nothing hidden
Candidates that were considered and did not clear your thresholds remain visible and explainable. You can audit what you are not seeing.
Past the usual names
Coverage reaches companies that are not yet on every corporate development list, which is where the asymmetry still lives.
Fresh by default
The view is maintained continuously. There is no refresh project, no quarterly rebuild, no stale snapshot to apologise for.
Per-mandate separation
Each mandate keeps its own view, so a view built for one category is never diluted by another's candidates.
You define what strategically relevant means.
Origination quality is downstream of mandate quality. Which is why the mandate is yours to write, in your language, with your thresholds — and why changing it changes what you see immediately.
- Categories that extend you. Not a sector taxonomy — the specific territory adjacent to what you already operate.
- Stages you can move at. From idea to growth, whichever your governance can actually transact in.
- Geographies you can support. Where you can realistically be a useful strategic partner.
- The ownership you want. The instrument and the scale of position worth pursuing.
- Your own thresholds. Custom criteria, weighted the way your committee actually weighs them.
Adjacent industrial intelligence
Edit the mandate and the view reflects it immediately. No rebuild, no waiting period.
Attention is the scarcest input you have.
A long list is not coverage — it is a tax. Qualification exists so that what reaches a human has already earned the right to be there.
Measured against your mandate
Fit is scored on the criteria you set, with the weightings you chose — not a universal definition of a good company.
Thresholds enforced
Anything below your bar stays out of your queue. You raise or lower the bar whenever you want.
Reasoning preserved
The basis for every score travels with the candidate, so a judgement can always be challenged.
Ranked for action
What surfaces first is what is both most relevant and most time-sensitive.
One category is a hobby. Every category is a strategy.
A serious ecosystem has a dozen adjacent territories, not one. Origination runs across all of them simultaneously, with no cap on how many you hold — and no obstacle to pointing several mandates at the same one when you want depth there.
Simultaneous territories
Every category you care about is covered at the same time, not rotated through on a schedule.
Stackable claims
Several mandates can cover one territory at once, each with its own thresholds — so you can work the early and the consolidating end of a category together.
Add without slowing
New coverage comes online without degrading anything already running.
Qualification flows straight into conversation.
In most programmes, a qualified candidate becomes a line in a document that someone will get to. Here, clearing qualification is what opens the relationship — with everything already learned about the company travelling with it.
- No re-briefing, no context reset, no second discovery pass.
- The reasoning that qualified a company informs how the conversation opens.
- Nothing promising sits in a queue waiting for a free afternoon.
Even the companies you pass on pay you back.
Continuous coverage of your adjacent territory is strategic intelligence whether or not you ever take a position. Most groups would pay for the map alone.
Where the category is going
A live read on the direction of your adjacency, assembled from the companies staking their existence on a view of it.
Competitive early warning
See the companies that will reshape your market while they are still small enough to partner with rather than react to.
Build-or-buy clarity
A grounded answer to whether to build a capability or own someone already building it well.
An acquisition shortlist
Years of observed performance on the companies you may eventually want to acquire outright.
What early actually buys you
Representative perspectives from corporate development and strategy functions.
We had seen the company. That was never the issue. We saw it eleven months before the round and did nothing, because nobody owned the follow-up.
The map turned out to be as valuable as the positions. Our build-or-buy conversations stopped being opinion-led within a quarter.
What changed was that relevance was defined by us. Every generic deal-flow product we tried was optimised for someone else's definition of interesting.
Perspectives are representative of the functions served and are not attributed to named individuals or clients.
Origination questions
What evaluators ask about coverage and qualification.
How do you decide what is relevant to us?
You do. Relevance is measured against the mandate you write — your categories, stages, geographies and thresholds. There is no house view of a good company being applied to your pipeline.
Can we see what was filtered out?
Yes. Candidates that were considered and did not clear your thresholds stay visible with their reasoning, so you can audit the coverage rather than trust it blindly.
How current is the view?
It is maintained continuously rather than rebuilt periodically. What you open reflects the present state of your adjacency, not a snapshot from the last review cycle.
Can we run several mandates at once?
Yes, with no limit, and several can cover the same territory — including the same company. Sourcing a company you already hold produces a further tranche of that holding rather than a refused duplicate, so conviction can be built on. Deliberately stacking mandates in one category is how you accumulate depth there.
What if our strategy changes?
Edit the mandate. The view reflects the change immediately — there is no reconfiguration project and no waiting period before coverage follows your new direction.
Find out who is already building in your adjacency.
Write one mandate and see the companies extending your ecosystem right now, ranked against your own definition of relevant.