Global M&A Leader Increases Business Velocity via Automation
Paul Dondos
Founder & CEO
Paul, how would you describe Artemis Origination in a nutshell?
We are the premium global M&A originators for the knowledge economy. That means we work closely with tier corporate and PE-backed acquirers to find, engage and transact companies at the innovation frontier all over the world.
What would you say makes you different from other M&A companies?
There are lots of types of M&A companies, and many do quite different things to Artemis Origination. Sell-side M&A advisors, for example, work for companies wishing to sell rather than investors wishing to buy; we’re buy side. And execution-focused firms, which includes all the investment banks, are mainly dedicated to closing deals, rather than putting them together in the first place; the majority of our work is pure origination, i.e. finding and aligning sellers sufficiently with our clients to agree on heads of terms and go into the transaction.
Unlike on the sell-side not all ‘sellers’ actually want to sell - to anyone at all. So being in buy side origination means working at high quality and high volume to be successful. You need to have and maintain hundreds, if not thousands, of relationships and conversations to generate steady ‘deal flow’. And you need intensive insight and connectivity across the board to turn some of those into transactions.
This sounds very interesting but somewhat complicated. What is your approach to providing such a service?
Like so many things in business, it comes down to talent, technology and people. We have a hugely talented, international, multi-disciplinary team, running public and proprietary databases and CRM. And we have processes for systematic origination that we have developed through over 160 engagements for some of the most prolific and successful buyers and investors in the world.
What is your take on technology being used in M&As? What do you use it for?
100% necessary to be effective, let alone competitive, in the modern environment. We use it to maintain that volume and quality of insight and relationships across thousands of complex, fast-moving firms – as you’d expect from these firms at the innovation frontier.
It seems something was missing in your techstack? Did you feel that more could be done if the solution was tailored to your business model and processes?
Yes. There’s no way, even with a highly customizable CRM like Salesforce (that we use) that you can have a robust off-the-shelf system to manage and deploy the types of data that we deal with in the many thousands of interactions we have every year with buyers and sellers. There are some incredible developments in public databases that scrape LinkedIn and websites with AI and make the data - enhanced even - available for a monthly subscription. But that doesn’t cover the data points we get from direct conversations with owners and investors on an hourly basis.
If you can harness that micro-data, you can completely raise the game in terms of matching buyers and sellers – based on proprietary, very up-to-date information, not information released periodically to the public to sell products, services and CVs.
How did you get to know CoMantis and why were we a good fit for such a case?
I knew one of CoMantis’s co-founders from pre-pandemic times. We have been following your progress and she told me that you are specialized in solving complex challenges in the intersection between business processes - technology - client outcomes, as well as acting as hands-on implementers rather than pure consultants. Your creativity and attention to detail as well as your experience with other businesses made it easier for us to explain what we envisioned.
We needed a company that would be able to find a solution that was within budget, flexible enough to cover all our needs and be built on technology that would facilitate future upgrades with other (more sophisticated) tools on the market. You are not vendor-dependent and your focus was on finding the right solution for us, which was a different experience from someone who works on commission.
Could you tell us more about your experience while you were going through the process with us?
It was refreshing to see that you wanted to understand our business in depth before proposing something applicable to our case. You showed us the limitations of the solutions we were using at the time, and what we needed as a solution in order to build a minimal viable product (MVP) that would achieve the objectives of our daily activities.
You had several sessions with several people from our teams including myself with the objective of understanding what we were doing on a daily basis. You then reviewed several solutions, showed us a selection and, with us, chose the best option to fit our needs based on now and how we plan to develop the product in the future. Your flexibility made it easier for us to see a new design or a new process with each iteration. So we could tune in the process and the interface to a finer degree each time.
Now that you started working with the system, have you and your team felt any significant changes or even benefits?
It is definitely easier for us to import and capture data for many companies but also to monitor and enrich the data from former client engagements. We were able to recategorize the data from our previous engagements and import it into the new system. This move made it possible for us to not only analyze our productivity from previous years but also have a complete overview of our whole database.
The main effect of this aggregation and categorization of data is that we are able to identify opportunities for some of our current clients from opportunities that we thought would rarely amount to a deal. We saw the way some of our prospects increase their commercial and financial results and became suitable for some of our current clients. In this way we were able to show the value we provide to them in real time.
How do you see the development of your proprietary solution in the near future? What kind of challenges do you see for such a development?
We are all aware that AI is a game changer in tech. We also know that it is very applicable in our case as we would need to collect and analyze even more data in the near and distant future. With it, we can continue to go way beyond the standard data analysis prevalent in the industry.
As data grows and the intelligence to draw insights from it improves, we will be able to participate in the investment process on the buyside and help clients make better investment decisions, smartly informed by AI. In fact, we have already made significant developments to our platform in 2024 to accommodate AI and are seeing the results already.
Based on what you have seen and what we have delivered so far, how would you summarize our relationship and the results of this project?
CoMantis is our trusted partner that we engage with whenever we hit a brick wall with a non-standard technical challenge and we need someone to look at it from a different perspective. You are not afraid of taking on a new, unusual challenge and you know your way around the tech market. We hope to work with you again on another project in the future!
Thank you for the kind words, Paul!
The Service
Artemis Origination chose Operations Automation as a service provided by CoMantis Ltd.