The Buyer You Already Know

The Buyer You Already Know - Raise Smarter

Venture’s top-line numbers look strong this year. The exit side tells a different story. With the IPO pipeline slipping, acquisitions are carrying the load, and acquisitions are relationship deals. Here’s what the latest data shows, two October deals where the buyer already knew the team or the product, and what founders and fund managers can do now.

The Exit Squeeze, in Numbers

The PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor for Q3 2026, as reported by SiliconANGLE on October 8, paints a clear picture:

  • One deal dominated exits. SpaceX’s $60 billion all-stock purchase of Anysphere, the company behind Cursor, was 53.1% of Q3 exit value and the second-largest acquisition of a VC-backed company on record. Without it, Q3 exits were about $53 billion, the lowest since late 2024.
  • IPOs are thin. Only 18 venture-backed US companies went public in Q3, 12 of them in healthcare. PitchBook called the quarter’s listings “rather mundane.”
  • The backlog keeps growing. A record 992 US unicorns, with a combined value of $5.7 trillion, were waiting for liquidity at the end of September. Another 179 were minted this year.

PitchBook’s Nizar Tarhuni summed it up: “the real story sits on the exit side.” With IPO timelines slipping, sellers lean on M&A “to get anything done at all.” His warning: “This year’s numbers will look like a boom at the top line. But for most of the market, the liquidity won’t show up, and that will have a large impact going into 2027.”

A Busy Month for Acquisitions

October has been active. One independent tracker, Acquired (startupsacquired.com), had counted 180 startup exits worldwide this month as of October 27, and only 26 of them disclosed a price. The largest disclosed deals were LSEG’s purchase of Octus ($3.54 billion) and Intel’s purchase of Classiq (about $2.3 billion). Ten of the 180 were acquihires. That count uses its own methodology and global scope, and the month isn’t over, so treat it as a snapshot.

The takeaway: in that count, most deals came with no public price at all, which means the quiet tuck-ins and team acquisitions rarely make headlines.

Case Study: Meta and Sundial

On October 23, Axios reported that Meta had acquired Sundial, an AI data-analytics platform. Sundial’s co-founders are Julie Zhuo, a former Meta VP of product design, and Chandra Narayanan, a former Facebook director of analytics who also led analytics at Instagram and Sequoia. Several other Sundial employees are Meta alumni.

After the deal, Narayanan will lead Meta’s data analytics tooling and agents work, and Sundial will stop serving outside customers once the deal closes. Terms weren’t disclosed.

The lesson: the eventual buyer was the founders’ former employer. The relationship existed before the company did.

Case Study: Stout and Flightline

On October 13, Chicago advisory firm Stout announced it had acquired Flightline, an agentic AI company. Stout says Flightline had “collaborated with Stout for more than 12+ months,” building AI workflows inside real client engagements, with commercial diligence as the proving ground. Terms weren’t disclosed.

The lesson: a partnership turned into an acquisition. Stout had seen the product work, on real clients, for over a year before it bought the company. The partnership was, in effect, a long diligence process.

Two Examples, Not a Rule

It’s worth being clear: these are two deals, not a trend, and not every acquisition looks like this. But both show how much easier a deal can be when the buyer already trusts the team and has seen the product work. That’s something founders can influence years in advance.

For founders, the practical question isn’t “how do I sell my company?” It’s “who already knows my team and has seen my product work?” For fund managers, it’s “which buyers in my sectors know my portfolio companies, and who on my team knows them?” Both questions can be answered long before a banker ever gets involved, and both get easier the earlier you start.

What Founders Can Do Now

  1. Map your possible buyers early. Former employers, large customers and integration partners in your market are worth listing now. Keep those relationships warm with updates and help, not sale pitches.
  2. Answer “who buys this?” with names. With IPOs this thin, early investors want to believe in an M&A path. A specific list of strategic buyers, and real relationships with some of them, makes that path credible.
  3. Use partnerships as long diligence. A pilot or co-development project with a potential strategic brings in revenue and lets them see your team at work.
  4. Stay on good terms with past employers. Sundial’s founders built their company after years inside the company that later bought it.
  5. Model, test, adjust. Once a quarter, review your buyer map: who did you talk to, which relationships grew, and where do you need an introduction?

What GPs Can Do Now

  1. Give LPs an M&A path, not an IPO dream. Tarhuni warns that for most of the market, the liquidity won’t show up. Show LPs how your portfolio companies reach strategic buyers.
  2. Treat corp-dev relationships as a portfolio service. Knowing the corp-dev and business-unit leaders who buy in your sectors helps founders and signals to LPs that you understand exits.
  3. Diligence founder networks as an exit asset. A founder’s relationships inside their target industry, like Sundial’s founders at Meta, can matter as much as their deck.

Build the Relationship Before the Deal

Warm introductions to corp-dev teams, partnership leads and strategic investors, made years early, are how founders turn “who buys this?” into named relationships. An introduction doesn’t create an acquisition. It starts a relationship that one day might.

ConnectLab.live maps warm paths alongside your own contacts, so you can see who in your network already sits close to the investors and partners who matter to your plans. It doesn’t arrange deals; it helps you find the people who can open the door.

Connection is the currency of the 21st Century.

Which three companies could one day want what you’re building, and who do you know inside each of them?

If you’d like help with that, here’s an open invitation:

Sources

About Ken McArthur

Ken McArthur is the founder of ConnectLab.live, an AI relationship-intelligence and warm-intro platform that helps founders who are raising find the funds that fit and the people who can introduce them, and helps fund managers connect with the founders they back. He was recently accepted into Harvard Business School Foundry. He also writes Raise Smarter, a daily newsletter on what's really moving in early-stage fundraising. Ken challenges us to realize we ALL have an impact, whether we want to or not, on thousands of people we touch in our day-to-day lives, and he shows that simple things make a HUGE difference. ConnectLab.live grew out of that belief. Connection is the currency of the 21st Century, and the right introduction can change a company's future. Long before ConnectLab, Ken was the popular host of live events that brought together top-level marketers, entrepreneurs, business owners, corporations and non-profit organizations to build multi-million dollar joint venture relationships. He has managed product launches ranked in the top 400 sites on the Internet and is regularly asked to speak at leading marketing events. He created AffiliateShowcase.com, a pioneering affiliate program search engine and directory. He also founded the MBS Internet Research Center, which conducted the world's largest survey ever attempted on creating and launching successful information products. Ken was the official mentor for Sterling Valentine as he took his launch from zero to over $100,000 in less than 8 days, a proof of concept documented in Info Product Blueprint. Today he puts that same skill for connecting people and launching ideas to work for founders and the investors who back them.

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