JP Lewin

CEO Foundy: sell & acquire £100k to £15m revenue businesses via Foundy.com's first of its kind AI powered acquisition portal | You no longer need 5 separate tools and 4 advisors, Foundy has all in one portal.

22 acquisitions completed. Recent client received 4 offers in a month and sold in 9 weeks to a YC-backed buyer for a multi-7-figure cash sum. 12,000+ acquirers signed up.

My Story
After selling my first company, I realized M&A is broken. Tens of thousands spent on advisors, months wasted on tire-kickers. I built DealFlowAgent to fix it.

What I Do
I run an AI-native M&A advisory firm with a world-first conversational AI matchmaking engine. Think Boardy or JackandJill.AI but focussed on matchmaking business buyers to business sellers. 4000% higher liklihood of completing a successful deal through this method compared to a marketplace. 

How? Our AI Deal Origination Manager on the buy side, Sterling, has 15 minute conversations with acquirers to understand their unique search interests and criteria before matching them with sellers in our internal mandates or partner network and beyond. Every sell-side client gets an expert human advisory team plus a custom-trained Deal Concierge that becomes a deep expert in your business and process. Human + AI delivers investment bank-grade deal prep from start to completion.


How I Can Help
Business Owners: Thinking about selling in 1-36 months? Head to DealFlowAgent.com for a personalised list of active acquirers, then chat with our Exit Planning AI, Sage, to build your exit plan and improve your company's real valuation. 

Acquirers & Investors: Sterling is free. 15-minute conversation, then receive tailored deal flow matched to you.
M&A Advisors & Brokers: Upload your mandates and let our network find qualified acquirers.

The Vision
Give owner the highest probability of a successful exit with the right buyer
Become the default M&A infrastructure for 1m to 50m $/ £ M&A market. Relationships and real conversations can't be scraped by generic AI. Every Sterling conversation compounds into a proprietary advantage. 

Following recent traction, we've raised from an amazing group of investors including the former CTO of a fintech that scaled 0 to $1bn revenue and a term sheet from a fund with 30 + unicorns in the Partners Portfolio.

Based in London, frequently in New York. If you've made it this far, we should probably just talk. Send me a Direct Message.

Founder and CEO

Foundy has overhauled the acquisition process for tech business sellers and acquirers. We are specialists in helping founders ready their business for an exit, including preparing their data room and finding relevant acquirers. Alternatively, founders and buyers can use our platform for free on a self-serve basis if they prefer. 

Buyer accounts include representatives of large tech companies, private equity and software aggregators as well as acquisition entrepreneurs and family offices. Sellers include founders of mostly profitable online businesses in verticals such as SaaS, fintech, mobile apps, marketplaces, eCommerce, Amazon FBA, Web3 and AI but we are very much open to hearing from companies in other sectors and industries, as well as distressed businesses. 

Alongside a range of digital tools and M&A advisory services, I am helping my team to produce podcasts, tutorials and blogs with the intention of delivering helpful insights and tips to company leaders, buyers and aspiring entrepreneurs on their journey to exit 💵

Join today by creating a free and anonymous account or sign up to our newsletter on https://app.foundy.com/sign-up

Joe Lewin

There's something about a good founder dinner.

Last night was one of those. Only a handful of people in the room. The conversation was one of the best I've had in a while. A mix of exited founders, someone about to close an 8-figure seed round, another who joined a startup at seed stage and drove it to a $400m + valuation before starting his own thing, people from HSBC Innovation Banking supporting the ecosystem, a few others in stealth.

What I loved most: it was one of the few rooms where I didn't feel the need to self-deprecate. Talking about big ambitions and scale felt normal, not out of place. That's rare in the UK.

The conversation that stuck: why does the UK offer so much less breathing room for entrepreneurs to start, scale, stumble, and then succeed?

I remember my school having adverts at local train stations showing a split screen. A kid studying hard then the same person a decade or so later working in middle management. Caption: "A Stable Future." Nobody put up a poster of someone who built something from nothing.

The US has produced over 800 unicorns. The UK has approximately 55. The US is only 4.8x bigger by population. So what explains the rest of that gap?

The American Dream is a real cultural force. The British equivalent is... "don't get too big for your boots."

Can you reverse engineer a culture? What would you even change first? 

Big thanks to Jonathon, Jenni, Kofi and Misha, HSBC Innovation Banking and Google Cloud.

#Founders #UKBusiness #Entrepreneurship

Joe Lewin 

Founder | DealFlowAgent.com | Helping founders exit & buyers access deal flow | £/$1m to 50m Evergreen businesses (inc. home services & healthcare)

The seed investors behind Uber, Notion, and Canva just backed my company.

Partners of Long Journey Ventures include Arielle Zuckerberg, Pascal Levy-Garboua, Lee Jacobs, Cyan and Scott Banister. Angels include a founding employee of banking software giant, Temenos.

The vision has always been clear, but the technology to truly modernise this highly fragmented process didn't exist until recently. We've built a vertically integrated M&A process for business owners in the £1M to £30M range.

10,000 baby boomer business owners retire every day. Buyers spray thousands of cold emails hoping to find hidden gems. Owners don't know who to trust or who will protect what they've built.

The most sought after companies going forward? Evergreen, essential businesses. HVAC, care homes, pest control, plumbing, fire safety, specialist clinics. Stable, cash-generative, and experiencing unprecedented demand from PE funds, search funds, and roll-up aggregators. The owners who built them deserve a proper process.

DealFlowAgent is the first AI-native M&A advisory firm covering the UK + US. We empower our advisers with vertical AI agents and conversational AI tools. More qualified acquirer connections. More offers. Better deal terms. Shorter timelines.

The human adviser isn't going anywhere. At this level, relationships and judgment will always matter.

22 transactions completed. PE funds, search funds, and strategic acquirers are joining every week looking for deal flow.

If you know a business owner in home services, healthcare, essential services, or vertical SaaS thinking about what comes next, send this to them privately.

That's exactly who we built this for.

And if you're a founder, investor, acquirer, or adviser who's seen this problem up close, I'd love to hear your take in the comments.

Funding announcement for DealFlowAgent

There are 20,000 letting agencies in the UK. Many have been around for decades.

Within 2 years, Dwelly has reached the top 15. 

Huge congrats to Dan, Ilia and the team on their $93M raise. It's been great seeing the company grow. Dwelly is a textbook AI-enabled roll-up: acquire independent property agencies, integrate their best-in-class AI operating system, and deliver a service the incumbents simply cannot match.

The results speak for themselves. Maintenance resolution times cut from 50 days to 20. Time to find a tenant down from three weeks to under two. An average of 10 validated offers per property where a traditional agency might generate one or two.

The same opportunity exists across the trade services that surround homes and commercial property. Pest control, fire safety, HVAC, roofing, landscaping, roofing. Fragmented but essential to the backbone of society and largely untouched by technology. 

There are serious buyers actively looking to acquire and scale in these niches. And for the owners building these businesses, the right partner can take what you've built to a level that would be very hard to reach alone.

Dwelly is the proof of what's possible when you get it right.

What are your predictions for 2026? Which sector do you think is next?

#MergersandAcquisitions #AI #TradeServices #PrivateEquity #UKBusiness #Acquisitions

Dan Lifshits, Ilia Drozdov, Dwelly

Dwelly Co-Founder 🏡 | ex-Gett GM 🚕 | ex-McKinsey 🤓

Today, we're announcing $93M in funding for Dwelly, led by General Catalyst , with participation from Begin Capital, s16vc - Founders for Founders Fund, and Trinity Capital. 

Huge thanks to Marc Bhargava, Zeynep Yavuz-Willson, Hemant Taneja and Jeannette zu Fürstenberg at General Catalyst, and Emmett Ulian, James Newton and Craig Fox at Trinity Capital for supporting us.

There are over 20,000 letting agencies across the UK, many of which still rely on manual processes, phone-based coordination, and traditional decision-making approaches. In a £100B market, this can sometimes lead to delays — with tenants occasionally waiting weeks for relatively minor maintenance issues to be resolved.

Dwelly is an AI-powered roll-up designed to modernise this sector. We acquire independent letting agencies and integrate them into our AI operating system, helping streamline operations, improve responsiveness, and enhance service quality.

Importantly, we don’t replace what makes these agencies valuable. We preserve their local brands, relationships, and expertise — while equipping teams with technology that enables to operate more efficiently and deliver a better experience for landlords and tenants alike.

→ Top 15 UK letting agent in under 2 years
→ 10,000+ properties under management
→ £200m in rental roll
→ 10x more validated applications per property, hence letting times cut by a third
→ Maintenance times down 33% (with a clear path to 70%+ reduction)

That’s the product we’re building. Clearer, merit-based matching for tenants and landlords. Fewer manual steps for agents and less time wasted for everyone involved.

You can read more about our vision on Fortune, thanks to a brilliant interview by Jeremy Kahn.

Also, we’re hiring! All across the board - from engineers and product managers, to integrations and operations, with many other roles available: https://lnkd.in/dAiuanu8

Hey! You listened!

I'm Rayan 👋🏼

This is how I spend my weeks:

- I have breakfast with founders and investors
- I advise early stage startups at a board-level (for equity)
- I advise early stage startups on a practical level (for £250/month)
- I help founders understand how to become better fundraisers (see Squared)
- I host 1:1 founder retreats just outside London (They're £1.5k - ask me about them)

oh and own a dog business (Bow Wow London) 🐶

And solve bunch of other things. Just message me, I'm usually responsive.
Please don't DM decks, use https://www.tableforten.ventures/apply-now to submit.

ps. You can also probably get my attention if you talk about CrossFit 🏋🏻‍♂️ or Yoga 🧘🏻‍♂️

Rayan Bannai

I'm giving away £1k at breakfast next week.
Not a prize. Not a competition.
Just an initial investment ticket to one of the founders sitting at the table.

Breakfast with Founders has become something I didn't fully expect when I started it.
The conversations are better than most meetings I take.
The network has become one of the most useful I have.
And honestly - some of my best investment conversations have started over eggs.

Next week we do it again. Ten founders. One table. One £1k ticket.

Waitlist is in the comments.


Thanks to Vestd for continuing to support the series.

Rayan 🎈

If you're building a tech or consumer product this is for you.
I'm inviting ten super cool founders around for breakfast. 

The last one was epic, I had people message me who hadn't come telling me they'd heard about it.

The food doesn't come with limits thanks to Brother Marcus.
And neither does the quality of founders.

If you're free and interested to join - waitlist in comments or DM me if any questions!

oh and if you read this far - one founder walks away with £1k.

-------

Thank you as ever to Vestd for supporting my series!

If you're a founder keen to meet, I'd love to have breakfast with you in London. Link to waitlists are in my featured section. Naturally, I can't meet with everyone, but I'll always try to make time to speak!


Breakfast with Founders

Had a 10am meeting at Barclays this morning with Brian and Sophia.


Being the tech person I am, I generally rely on apps to get me around.

Jump onto Forest app - one bike, 5mins away. Walk to it, it's been dissected for parts.
Check the lime app - nothing for 10mins at least.
Sh*t. Now I'm late. 

Drop an email to apologise.

I need fast solutions.
Check Bolt app - driver keeps cancelling.
Uber - same thing. 10mins. To wait.

So I walk alongside the road.
Wave my hand out like it's early 2000s and a black cab immediately stops.

I jump in, we spend the journey talking about EV efficiency.
The driver just bought an electric cab off of someone he's known for a while and trusts - good relationship meant he trusts it's in good nick.
I also learnt how cabbies optimise their day using electric vehicles.

*Welcome to my brain *- it really makes me think - Are we really overcomplicating our every day problems with tech or are we just not prepared enough for when tech doesn't work?

Do we need to be a bit hybrid in our tech solutions and have fallbacks to truly win the market.


Got to Barclays 10mins later - more on that another time..!

Am I the only one who doesn't understand the media uproar against James Watt's 'equity for punks' scheme?

I'm seeing stories about the fact that he 'should' return any returns he makes out of a potential sale of BrewDog back to anyone who bought into the 'equity for punks'. 

I've reviewed a couple of documents, decks and high level terms.

And I'm trying to understand why this deal gets any more scrutiny than any other if it doesn't end positively for all.

I wish every investment came with preferences whether you invest £10 or £10,000 😂 

Any form of investment is high risk and Brewdog is no exception. There's two things we can learn from this:

- retail or community investors should be made more aware of the risks. It's very easy for consumer-led brands to raise investment from their communities who emotionally are attached to the brand. But equally, the real level of responsibility  that brands have when marketing investment opportunities is quite light. When I think back to my biggest mistakes - I got drawn in emotionally as a consumer and didn't really think twice about the risks because I was naive to believe my favourite brands will always be loyal back to me. 

- if the media doesn't like someone, they will be out to get them on anything no matter what.

my dad pretty much forced me to physics up to a-levels.
"you can do whatever you like, but physics has to be one of them"

i thought it was just because he was a physicist himself, but having spent my entire life in the startup world, there's one thing i've noticed.

some of the most exceptional founders I know are physicists. 

if I was to hazard a guess on the correlation:

physicists are:
- infinitely curious. there is no limit in understanding or learning more. there is no right or wrong and theories can be proven to realities. 
- they become resilient through being patient. physicists can spend months on end failing and failing and failing until something proves to align with even 10% of their theory. enough to move forward a little.
- being slightly delusional. at this point in humanity, we think we've discovered it all and yet there's always something you can continue to defy. history will show us that physicists were avoided for being slightly weird and a bit delusional - though, they also proved gravity, discovered electricity and even nuclear reactions.

only a few characteristics which make me go.

ha.

that makes sense - same as those exceptional founders.

taplio

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The Battle

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