Anvil Partners sourced both sides of a deal in Inven — and cut research time by 70%

The companies worth finding leave almost no data trail

On the investor side, Anvil typically works with private equity firms in two situations: expanding an existing portfolio company through add-on acquisitions, and entering new verticals for the first time through platform investments. Both depend on research quality before any relationship work begins.

"There are a lot of important parts to this business, but research is the pillar. It's the engine. Good research saves you an enormous amount of time later," says Philippe Didisheim, Founding Partner at Anvil Partners.

The difficulty is where Anvil operates. Companies between $5M and $300M in revenue are largely undocumented, and researching them by hand is slow.

"A lot of these owners aren't on LinkedIn. Their employees aren't either. You need different tools to pull that information, and that's where Inven has helped us enormously."

Coverage is only half of the problem. The companies worth finding are the ones nobody has already called. "The game is finding the hidden gems everyone else is overlooking. If you're the biggest landscaping company in Florida, everybody is reaching out to you."

"We're not trying to win a competitive race. We're trying to find the business that's just as good and slightly overlooked."

Philippe Didisheim moved the research into Inven workflows

Philippe has moved the firm's research out of one-off searching and into workflows, with Inven connected to Claude as the point where the research actually happens.

Anvil defines the vertical, the criteria, and the shape of a good target. Inven maps the market against it: which companies exist, which fit, which associations they belong to, which accreditations they hold, and who to contact at each one. Claude coordinates the runs, and Anvil's other sources sit in the same thread.

"We're moving into a world where you just want one portal, and that portal tends to be Claude. Inven works seamlessly there. A lot of other tools have been slow to get going on that front."

The firm's research team runs these workflows day to day. Philippe and the senior team review the output.

"I can consolidate all of our resources and tools into one thread that connects to Inven, and we build our lists there. That automation has saved us an enormous amount of time."

Four workflows Anvil runs on Inven

Mapping a new vertical from the ground up

When Anvil takes on a new space, the job is not a list. It is a defensible view of an industry the client is about to enter.

"We need to work out how many companies exist in that industry that fit the criteria, and I want to build every possible route to finding them. Which sources work, which accreditations and associations these companies belong to. We build workflows with Inven as a core component."

Because the research is traceable, Philippe can interrogate it rather than accept it. "Once it's done, I'll ask it a hundred questions and work out exactly where it found each company."

The output goes to the client as analysis, not a spreadsheet: "We build in-depth data presentations on top of that, with Inven data as the base."

Expanding a space Anvil already knows well

The harder research problem is the second pass. In a vertical where Anvil already holds hundreds of companies, finding genuinely new ones means running many search angles and screening everything already known.

That work used to be manual and repetitive: rewrite the keywords, run it again, compare by hand, repeat.

"Now I can have Claude pick its own keywords and run them all at once, so I'm not doing that dozens of times myself. It checks on its own that we're not pulling companies already in the database, across all of our CRMs and every other place we keep research."

A new list of 50–100 qualified companies in a space Anvil already covers took two days. It now takes seven to eight hours.

List building into outreach

Where the job is a clean list, the workflow runs end to end. "If we're building a new list, it exports with emails and goes straight into our outreach workflow, which sets up the emails and gets things moving."

Connecting owners with the right long-term partners

Connecting business owners with institutional buyers is also a core part of Anvil's work. When an owner is considering a transition or capital partner, the team uses Inven to build the relevant buyer universe and rank investors against the owner's priorities and Anvil's fit criteria. Anvil's senior team then reviews a focused shortlist before making targeted introductions.

"These are all workflows that used to take a full day. Now they're down to an hour."

70% less research time, and a transaction sourced on both sides

The time saving holds across the firm's research work: market maps from a day to three hours, second-pass list building from two days to seven or eight, buyer-matching workflows from a day to an hour.

The three-hour estimate includes manual review. Philippe and the senior team check every company by hand before it goes out. "It goes from a day to three hours. I say three hours because I review every single company by hand to make sure the quality is there. Even then, you're saving 70% of your time."

The clearest outcome is a completed transaction where Anvil sourced both parties in Inven. Anvil found a small, independently owned mechanical insulation business that everybody else had overlooked. It was not a fit for the client, but Philippe had already built a relationship with the owner of a larger privately owned insulation business, also found through an Inven target list. The geography and size lined up, so he made the introduction. The two owners met in person and went on to complete a transaction.

It was Anvil's first private-to-private transaction, in a category the firm is doubling down on.

Measurable outcomes:

• 70% reduction in research time
• Market map of a new vertical in 3 hours, down from a day
• 50–100 qualified companies in a covered space in 7–8 hours, down from 2 days
• Buyer-matching workflows in about an hour, down from a day
• Buyer and seller of one completed transaction both sourced by Anvil in Inven
• Used daily by Anvil's research team and analysts

"We had a deal where Anvil sourced both sides of the transaction using Inven."