01
The private company blind spot

PitchBook covers the funded.
Most of the market isn't.

Deal sourcing platforms like PitchBook and CB Insights are excellent at tracking the venture-backed and growth-equity ecosystem — funded rounds, valuations, investor syndicates, exit activity. For that universe they are genuinely comprehensive.

But the vast majority of attractive acquisition targets — particularly in industrial, professional services, healthcare, manufacturing, and niche technology sectors — are private, profitable, self-funded businesses that have never raised a round, never issued a press release, and never appeared in any deal database. They exist in the real economy, not the venture economy.

Fullinfo maps these companies from the open web — structured profiles with industry classification, locations, markets served, customer types, leadership hierarchy, and growth signals — for 100M+ organisations globally. If a business has a website, it is in Fullinfo with a profile no deal database contains.

Example — private company discovery
"Privately owned vehicle inspection companies in Germany, 50–500 employees, no known investor backing"
Example — roll-up target identification
"Independent pilates and boutique fitness studios in North America — full market map, private ownership"
Sample targets — precision engineering · Germany · Private · 50–500 employees
Kern-Werte Präzision GmbH
kern-werte.de · 🇩🇪 Stuttgart
Private
Industry
Precision machining · CNC · Aerospace
Employees
201–500
Markets served
Germany · France · USA
In PitchBook
Not found
Müller Feinmechanik AG
mueller-fein.de · 🇩🇪 Munich
Private
Industry
Precision instruments · Medical devices
Employees
51–200
Markets served
DACH · Benelux
In PitchBook
Not found
Heinz Technik GmbH
heinz-technik.de · 🇩🇪 Nuremberg
Private
Industry
Industrial automation · Robotics
Employees
51–200
Markets served
Germany · Eastern Europe
In PitchBook
Not found
Fullinfo returned 340 matching targets. PitchBook returned 0.
Vehicle inspection market — Germany · Full universe · Fullinfo
TÜV Rheinland
🇩🇪
20,000+ emp.
Consolidated
DEKRA SE
🇩🇪
44,000+ emp.
Consolidated
GTÜ Gesellschaft
🇩🇪
501–1,000
Target
KÜS Kraftfahrzeug
🇩🇪
201–500
Target
SW Prüftechnik GmbH
🇩🇪
51–200
Platform
More independent operators
🇩🇪
1–50 emp.
Add-ons
Complete market map: 1,204 operators · full size distribution · ownership type · locations · contacts
02
Fragmented market mapping

Before you source a deal,
map the whole market.

Fragmented markets are among the most attractive for roll-up strategies — but you need to know the full universe before deciding who to approach first. How many operators are there? What's the size distribution? Who are the natural platform assets and who are the add-ons?

Traditional deal sourcing answers these questions through manual research, broker networks, and trade associations — a process that takes weeks and still misses most of the market. Fullinfo answers them in a single structured search.

Search by industry, location, size, ownership type, keywords, and markets served to produce a complete universe of operators in a fragmented sector. Filter to identify platform candidates from add-on targets. Export the full list for your origination team.

Example — roll-up market map
"All independent vehicle inspection companies in Germany — full market map with size distribution, ownership, and locations"
03
Group structure intelligence

Know what you're
actually buying.

In M&A, understanding a target's corporate structure before you enter a process is a significant advantage. Subsidiaries, parent relationships, cross-border entities — these shape valuation, structure, regulatory exposure, and integration complexity.

Fullinfo maps corporate group structures through a proprietary intelligence layer that identifies entity relationships from signals companies inadvertently disclose across their web presence — without relying on formal legal registry data, which is often incomplete or inaccessible for privately held targets.

This is not a substitute for legal due diligence — but it gives deal teams a structured first view of a target's corporate footprint before engaging advisors, before entering a process, and before committing resources to formal investigation.

Importantly: Fullinfo associates entities through verified cross-domain signals, not name matching. A target that shares a name with an unrelated business will not have that business's profile merged into its own — a genuine problem with AI-powered research tools that scrape the web without entity resolution.

Group structure — Kern-Werte Holdings
Kern-Werte Holdings AG 🇨🇭
Ultimate parent · Switzerland
Kern-Werte Präzision GmbH 🇩🇪
Target entity · Stuttgart
KW Aerospace Division
Operating unit · Munich
KW Eastern Europe Sp. z o.o. 🇵🇱
⚠ Previously undisclosed
KW US Holdings Inc. 🇺🇸
Subsidiary · Delaware
⚠ Polish entity not disclosed in initial target presentation — identified through Fullinfo proprietary intelligence layer
Entities mapped through cross-domain signals · not name matching · source-linked
Deal signal monitoring — precision engineering targets · Germany
Kern-Werte Präzision GmbH
🟢 Strong signals
+22 vacancies this month Web traffic +34% New US location added Hiring: CFO role posted
Müller Feinmechanik AG
🟡 Moderate signals
Vacancy count stable New industry tag: Medical devices Founder age: 67 — succession?
Heinz Technik GmbH
🔴 Distress signals
Vacancies down -18 Web traffic -22% Leadership changes detected
Monitored monthly · signals sourced from company websites · exportable
04
Deal trigger signals

Reach targets when
the timing is right —
not when they go to market.

The best M&A conversations happen before a process starts — when a founder is thinking about succession, when a business is scaling faster than its current ownership can support, or when early signs of distress create receptivity to a conversation.

Fullinfo's monthly refresh surfaces observable signals from company websites that can indicate deal readiness: rapid hiring suggesting growth pressure, a CFO role posted suggesting a finance transformation, web traffic declining alongside vacancy reductions suggesting financial difficulty, a founder-led business with a long-tenured leadership team where succession is a natural question.

These are not definitive signals — but they tell you which companies on your watchlist are worth a conversation right now, and which can wait. For a deal team monitoring 50 targets in a fragmented market, that prioritisation is enormously valuable.

Monitoring use case
Track 50 precision engineering targets in Germany · alert on hiring spikes, new locations, leadership changes, traffic shifts, or distress signals · monthly refresh
Positioning

Fullinfo and PitchBook are different tools solving different problems.

PitchBook is the standard for tracking the funded startup and growth equity ecosystem. Fullinfo covers the vast majority of the market PitchBook doesn't — private, unfunded, non-VC-backed businesses across 195+ countries. Most deal teams will use both.

PitchBook / CB Insights — strong for
VC-backed and growth equity deal tracking
Funding round history and investor syndicates
Exit data — acquisitions, IPOs, secondary transactions
Valuation benchmarks within the startup ecosystem
Private, unfunded, non-VC businesses
Non-English markets at scale
Fragmented industrial or SMB markets
Fullinfo — strong for
Private, unfunded businesses — 100M+ orgs globally
Fragmented market mapping — full universe identification
Group structure via proprietary intelligence layer
Deal trigger signals — hiring, traffic, leadership changes
Non-English markets — 195+ countries, 100+ languages
Funding round history and investor data
Financial statements and valuation benchmarks
🔍
100M+ private companies
The unfunded, unlisted majority of the global business universe — not visible in PitchBook, CB Insights, or any deal database.
🗺️
Fragmented market maps
Full universe identification for any sector and geography. Platform targets vs add-ons. Size distribution. Ownership structure. In one search.
🔗
Proprietary entity mapping
Group structures found through cross-domain signals — not name matching, not registry-dependent. Surfaces relationships formal registries miss.
📡
Deal trigger monitoring
Monthly signals on hiring, traffic, locations, and leadership changes for companies in your watchlist. Know when to make the call.
Who this is for

Deal teams who source
before the process starts.

🏦

Private equity — origination

Identifying acquisition targets and platform companies in fragmented sectors — particularly where the best assets are private, profitable, and have never engaged with the M&A market.

💼

M&A advisory — buy-side

Mapping the universe of targets for a buy-side mandate before the shortlist is assembled. Finding companies that brokers don't know to introduce — because they don't appear in any database.

🏢

Corporate development

Systematic origination of acquisition targets aligned to strategic priorities — supplier consolidation, geographic expansion, product extension — across markets where manual research doesn't scale.

🌍

Cross-border & emerging market deals

Sourcing deal flow in non-English markets — DACH, Benelux, LATAM, Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe — where systematic origination through traditional channels is difficult or prohibitively expensive.

📊

Investment banking — sector coverage

Building proprietary market intelligence on sectors before pitching mandates. Demonstrating knowledge of the full competitive landscape — not just the companies on a prospectus list.

🔄

Roll-up strategy execution

Systematic identification of add-on targets in a fragmented market — with full coverage of the addressable universe, size distribution, and signals indicating which operators are most likely to transact.

Tell us the market
you're trying to map.

Send us a sector and geography and we'll show you what Fullinfo surfaces — including the targets your current tools can't find. Usually within 24 hours.