Synacti partners with high-growth, founder-owned companies in Europe’s software industry. Founded in London in 2023, Synacti’s buy-and-hold strategy focuses on providing early-stage companies and management teams with the resources and expertise to drive long-term growth.
After founding Synacti in 2023, Guy Mitchell and Mark Goodhead were on the hunt for their first acquisition while also working to build a robust pipeline of future deals. The team belonged to a broker network and a few subscription sites, but none of the opportunities they received aligned with the firm’s investment goals.
“We definitely spent a few months wandering in the dark,” says Guy, who also serves as Synacti’s CFO. “Not only were most of the opportunities just not the right fit, but they were also actively looking for investment, which meant a ton of competition. We knew we needed a way to find more proprietary opportunities that fit within our investment parameters.”
Enter Octavian Manoli, Synacti’s Head of Origination. Octavian is responsible for directly sourcing and engaging with promising off-market, founder-owned software companies that match Synacti’s investment criteria. And while he came to the team with a “black book” of 3,000+ potential opportunities, there was still a major problem: He’s one person.
“Software is an extremely large and broad landscape, and manually researching and filtering through private companies is very time consuming,” says Guy. “We knew we needed a tool to streamline that process and help Octavian quickly build a pipeline of qualified opportunities, or we would have to hire a lot more people.”
Synacti evaluated a number of deal sourcing platforms, but ultimately chose Sourcescrub because of its unmatched usability and coverage of the private company space. “We really liked Sourcescrub’s user interface and the fact that new companies are added to the tool literally every day, which means it continuously expands our universe of opportunities,” shares Guy.
Octavian uses Sourcescrub’s to filter through millions of software companies across thousands of sources, including conference lists, buyer’s guides, and more. He then narrows them down to lists of one hundred highly relevant opportunities that match specific theses requirements. These include ownership type, sub-sector, geography, and founding year, as well as growth signals like employee count.
He also leverages Sourcescrub’s AI-powered Similar Companies feature to instantly surface companies that closely resemble existing top targets. “We like to use Sourcescrub to find off-market businesses that are similar to those that match our investment criteria but are actively seeking funding. That definitely gives us a competitive edge and a compelling message to share in our initial outreach,” says Guy.
All target contact and company information is automatically passed from Sourcescrub to Synacti’s CRM platform, Salesforce, which then sends it to their sales acceleration platform, Outreach. This data is regularly updated and synchronized across all three platforms, so Octavian is sure he’s always sending the right founders the right messages at the right moments.
“Potential deals usually have to simmer for some time,” says Guy. “It’s critical to maintain those relationships, but it’s also impossible to manually stay on top of hundreds of opportunities at once. That’s why we love Sourcescrub’s company monitoring and alerts. It lets us keep tabs on all the targets we’re engaging with, and notifies us in real time if they hire a new executive, or receive an industry award, or anything else noteworthy happens. It gives us a reason to make contact, shows we’re paying attention, and keeps us top of mind whenever they’re ready.”
Synacti’s first acquisition, a customer support software platform called Callbell, was completed in December 2024 — and it originated in Sourcescrub. “There is no way we would have found Callbell, our very first acquisition, without Sourcescrub,” says Guy. “They were off-market, founder-owned, and a perfect fit for our firm, and thanks to Sourcescrub, we now have an entire pipeline of businesses like this.”
Consistently filing Synacti’s deal pipeline and reaching out to promising targets is also much faster and easier thanks to Sourcescrub. The team estimates that Octavian is able to source and engage companies at least 2x more efficiently than before. This has enabled the firm to stay lean and scale its origination efforts without having to add headcount.
“We would have had to hire two or three more people to do the job and see the results that we have with Sourcescrub,” reveals Guy. “That adds up to £120K annual cost savings on salaries alone. Sourcescrub is truly invaluable to our organization, and I’m genuinely impressed with how much the platform has helped us achieve in such a short time.”
