The recognition comes at an inflection point for Inven. In 2025 the company surpassed 1,000 B2B customers, ranked #10 on Sifted's Future 50, and grew ARR by 162% year-over-year — all while expanding a team that now stands at 81 people. For a company founded in 2022 and still in its early years, the numbers tell a clear story: the market for AI-powered M&A is real, and Inven is capturing it.

What Inven Does — and Why It Matters for M&A Teams

M&A professionals — investment bankers, private equity analysts, corporate development teams, and consultants — spend a significant portion of their time doing something that should be straightforward: finding and evaluating relevant companies to buy, invest in, or sell to.

In practice, it isn't. Traditional platforms such as PitchBook and Capital IQ were built around structured data: funding rounds, SIC codes, public filings. They work well for large, visible companies. They miss most of the private market — founder-led businesses, lower mid-market companies, and cross-border targets that have never raised institutional capital and don't appear in any database.

"Before Inven, teams spent weeks or months manually searching through platforms, databases, company websites, and spreadsheets — and still missed up to 80% of relevant private companies," says CEO Niilo Pirttijärvi.

Inven's approach is different. The platform uses AI to analyze over 28 million companies across 160+ countries, collecting signals, filings, and financial data to build a living picture of the private market. Users can search in plain language — describing the type of company they're looking for — and Inven surfaces results that no keyword search or industry code could find.

The outcomes reported by customers are substantial. Firms using Inven report finding 10× more relevant targets, sourcing opportunities 10× faster, and achieving 3–4× higher outreach response rates.

Beyond Search: Market Mapping and Financial Screening

Deal sourcing is only part of what Inven enables. Two use cases that have become central to how teams use the platform are market mapping and early-stage financial screening — workflows that previously consumed days of analyst time and still produced incomplete results.

Market mapping is the process of building a comprehensive view of all relevant companies in a given sector, geography, or niche before deciding where to focus. For consultants and corporate development teams, this is often the first step in any strategic project — and historically one of the most labor-intensive. Inven automates and dramatically expands this process, enabling teams to map an entire market in hours rather than weeks, and to surface companies that legacy databases systematically miss: bootstrapped operators, regional players, and cross-border targets invisible to structured classification systems.

Financial screening & qualification — the process of quickly assessing a company's size, growth trajectory, and financial health before committing analyst time to a deeper review — is another area where Inven changes the workflow. Rather than pulling together fragmented signals from multiple sources, Inven consolidates key financial indicators, headcount trends, and revenue proxies into a single view, allowing deal teams to rapidly qualify or eliminate targets from a long list and focus their energy on the most promising opportunities.

Together, these capabilities mean Inven is used not just to find companies, but to run the full front-end of the deal process: from initial market definition, through target identification and financial assessment, to having verified contacts ready for outreach — compressing what was previously weeks of work into hours.

Traction and Industry Recognition

Beyond the revenue numbers, Inven's 2025 saw a string of third-party validations:

In May 2025, Inven closed a $12.7 million Series A led by Ventech and Vendep Capital, with participation from angel investor Risto Siilasmaa and existing backers Lifeline Ventures and Joint Effects.

The round has funded continued product development and international expansion — the majority of Inven's customers are based in the United States, where demand for AI-driven private market intelligence is strongest.

Customer Evidence

The commercial case for Inven is increasingly documented in verified case studies:

  • Lexar Partners (private equity, Netherlands): 10× faster deal sourcing, with a full day of sourcing work reduced to 15–30 minutes — from initial search through to an enriched, outreach-ready target list
  • IGC Partners (Brazil investment bank): 3× more qualified buyers per mandate, with cross-border targets in South Africa, Austria, and Italy surfaced that CapIQ and Mergermarket missed entirely
  • makanta services (global boutique M&A advisory): 10× more relevant targets identified, with 3–4× higher engagement and response rates on outreach
  • Edgehill Management (New York search fund): First acquisition closed in 12 months — 40% faster than the 20-month Stanford Search Fund Study median — with the acquired company sourced directly from Inven
  • Gamma Point Advisory (M&A advisory, logistics & supply chain): 4 months of sourcing time eliminated, with 12–14 executive-level conversations initiated across Europe, Latin America, and Asia within months of onboarding

Built to Scale Globally from Day One

One structural advantage Inven has over many Nordic startups is that it was designed for international markets from the outset. The domestic market was never the target — the product was built for the workflows of deal teams in New York, London, and Frankfurt as much as Helsinki.

"Many Finnish startups struggle to scale due to the small domestic market," Pirttijärvi notes. "Most of our customers are in the US, where demand for our solution is strong and the economy is more resilient."

That global orientation, combined with a strong in-office culture and short decision loops, is how Inven plans to continue scaling in 2026 — toward broader enterprise adoption, deeper AI capabilities, and expansion into adjacent use cases including B2B sales intelligence, recruitment, and supplier sourcing.

‍About Inven

Inven is the AI platform for M&A. Used by 1,000+ investment banks, private equity firms, consultancies, and VCs globally, Inven enables teams to find, analyze, and connect with private companies at a speed and coverage that traditional platforms cannot match. Founded in 2022 and headquartered in Helsinki.

Helsinki, Finland — March 2026
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