Acqwired Emerges from Stealth with Operating System for Private Equity Deal Sourcing

After 18 months in stealth mode, Acqwired today announced the launch of its Deal Sourcing Operating System. The platform helps private equity investors identify and engage with high-fit acquisition targets more efficiently. By automating time-intensive manual tasks, the system enables investment professionals to focus on building relationships and closing deals rather than managing databases and CRMs.

Founded by Dan Herr, CEO, and Irfan Durmus, CTO, Acqwired addresses a critical inefficiency in private equity deal sourcing: investment professionals spending 95% of their time on manual tasks and only 3-5% on high-value relationship building. The platform leverages proprietary AI agents to automate this manual work, enabling dealmakers to focus on activities that drive returns. Targeting the lower middle market where 4,000 U.S. firms compete but only 400 have dedicated sourcing teams, Acqwired helps firms unlock non-linear growth in deal sourcing and proprietary deal origination.

“Private equity's dirty little secret is that growth is still tied to headcount,” said Acqwired Founder & CEO Dan Herr. “Currently, there are firms wasting time and money manually reviewing spreadsheets and websites one by one. Instead, Acqwired, is defining a new category: the Deal Sourcing OS. We're transforming how private equity professionals source deals by eliminating the manual grind that plagues sourcing teams. Our platform frees firms to focus on what truly moves the needle: building deep, trust-filled relationships with founders and closing deals.”

Acqwired's platform features proprietary AI technology that has demonstrated above 95% accuracy in identifying companies that fit a firm's investment themes and should be in the firm's CRM. The solution has already been tested with firms managing a combined $200 billion in assets, with early adopters describing it as mission-critical for their deal sourcing processes. The platform enables business development teams to surface hidden opportunities before competitors, quickly prioritize the most promising prospects, and systematically engage with potential acquisition targets. Feedback from pilot firms — along with multiple $100M+ TEV proprietary opportunities the platform generated during the pilot period — indicates that Acqwired provides extremely high ROI in the increasingly competitive lower middle market. The platform integrates with the industry-leading CRMs, including Salesforce, DealCloud, and Affinity, as well as existing data providers like SourceScrub, operationalizing AI-driven decision-making at the heart of investment processes.

"Having spent over a decade building AI-powered businesses and leading technical teams, I quickly saw the massive inefficiency in private equity deal sourcing," said Acqwired CTO, Irfan Durmus. "Our technology stack doesn't just organize data — it transforms it into actionable intelligence that gives investment professionals the insights they need to make faster, more impactful decisions."

Acqwired is currently offering access to its platform on an invite-only basis. Sourcing and investment professionals can apply for early access and request an invitation at www.acqwired.com.

ABOUT ACQWIRED

Acqwired transforms private equity deal sourcing with AI-powered research, enabling investors to surface hidden opportunities before their competitors. The platform eliminates inefficiencies that plague sourcing teams by providing AI-driven prioritization, alternative data ingestion, and customizable scoring. Acqwired enables dealmakers to focus on the right targets at the right time, without the noise. Launched in 2025 and headquartered in Lake Tahoe, Nevada, Acqwired is trusted by PE firms with a combined $200B+ in AUM to gain a competitive edge in an increasingly crowded market. For more information, visit www.acqwired.com.

ABOUT DAN HERR

Dan Herr is the Founder and CEO of Acqwired, the Deal Sourcing Operating System modernizing how private equity firms find and engage acquisition targets. Before launching Acqwired, he spent over a decade in private equity — first helping build a buyside firm, then scaling deal flow at Serent Capital, where he led one of the industry’s top sourcing teams.

A Cornell-trained engineer with an MBA, Dan has led or supported over $1B in transactions across North America and Europe. In 2020, after classifying thousands of companies by hand, he built an ML model that beat his own judgment — a turning point that led to Acqwired’s creation. He also co-hosts the Deal Sourcery podcast and lives in Lake Tahoe with his family.

ABOUT IRFAN DURMUS

Irfan Durmus is the Co-founder and CTO of Acqwired, where he leads engineering, AI infrastructure, and product development. Prior to Acqwired, Irfan served as Chief Software Architect for ESW Capital, a private equity firm in Austin, where he led large-scale “lift-and-shift” automation efforts across portfolio companies — including one initiative that reduced a 300-person engineering team to just three, while maintaining a global SaaS platform.

With over 20 years of experience building and automating enterprise-grade systems, Irfan brings deep expertise in distributed systems, backend architecture, and applied AI. At Acqwired, he is applying that same engineering discipline to private equity sourcing — turning messy data into decision-ready intelligence for dealmakers.

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