A shift is underway in M&A advisory, and it is moving faster than most firms expected.

Most advisory firms in Europe recognise that AI is something they need to act on. Many have appointed people to explore options, tested general-purpose tools, and started thinking about where AI fits into their practice. But for many, a clear strategy and the right tooling remain elusive. The intent is there. The execution is not.

Meanwhile, a new category of firm has emerged: AI-native M&A advisory practices that combine experienced dealmakers with purpose-built technology to compress timelines, reduce team sizes, and compete directly for mandates in the lower and mid-market. These are not startups selling software to banks. They are advisory firms that happen to be built on AI from the ground up.

Understanding what they are doing, and how quickly, is essential context for any firm planning its own response.

The Broader Pattern: Services as the New Software

This is not an M&A-specific phenomenon. In a recent article titled Services: The New Software, Julien Bek, Partner at Sequoia, mapped out more than ten verticals where AI-native services firms are positioned to replace both the software vendors and the incumbents they sell to. His core observation: for every dollar spent on software, six are spent on services. AI is turning that six into software.

"The next $1T company will be a software company masquerading as a services firm." — Julien Bek, Partner at Sequoia

The thesis is clear. If you sell the tool, you are in a race against the next model. But if you sell the work, if you own the outcome, every improvement in the underlying AI makes your service faster, cheaper, and harder to compete with.

In legal services, AI implementation is already well advanced. Harvey AI, reportedly valued at up to $8 billion as of early 2026, has grown to over 1,000 clients across 59 countries and reached $190M in annual recurring revenue. It started in the US, but is now aggressively expanding into Europe. It has opened offices in London, Dublin, and Paris, and is hiring 180 people across the continent in 2026. The legal profession did not see this coming five years ago. M&A advisory should take note.

Notable AI-Native M&A Firms

OffDeal

OffDeal positions itself as the investment bank for small businesses with $5M–$100M in revenue: a segment where traditional advisory economics often break down. Backed by a $12M Series A led by Radical Ventures (with Y Combinator participation), the firm has raised $17M in total and launched over 30 sell-side M&A transactions within its first year of operation.

Their model is built around a vertically integrated technology stack. AI generates pitch materials, identifies and scores buyer universes from a proprietary index of millions of companies, manages NDA workflows, and automates CIM and teaser production. The firm operates in lean two-person deal pods, one banker on business development, one on execution, with AI handling the analytical and administrative layers that would typically require a full team of analysts and associates.

In the firm's own words, they are building what Goldman Sachs would look like if it launched today. That is their positioning. But the capital behind it is real, and their trajectory demonstrates that serious venture capital sees the AI-native advisory model as investable, scalable, and directly competitive with traditional firms.

OffDeal currently operates in the US market. But the model is exportable: lean deal teams, AI-driven preparation, proprietary buyer intelligence. Harvey AI proved that in legal services. And in M&A, it has already arrived in Europe.

Eilla AI

Eilla AI has launched what it calls the first AI-native M&A advisory for SMBs in Europe, targeting companies in the $1M–$50M revenue range. The firm combines advisors with backgrounds at institutions such as Jefferies and Citi with AI that automates buyer identification, deal preparation, and outreach.

The numbers they report are striking. According to the firm's founders (as of early 2026), their fee pipeline grew from near zero to €14M within two months of launching the advisory practice. They state they have initiated 15 sell-side mandates with a further 10 going live, and report a 100% success rate in reaching management presentations with interested parties. These are self-reported figures, but even if directionally correct, the velocity is notable. All of this with a deal team of three people.

Behind the advisory sits a proprietary database of over 9 million companies. For each mandate, AI scans this universe to identify the most relevant acquirers based on synergies, deal history, sector fit, and strategic signals. The result is a buyer list that is custom-built per deal, not a templated shortlist recycled from prior mandates.

Eilla AI reports moving from onboarding to offers in approximately six weeks. For context, most traditional advisory processes take four to six months before a client sees a first offer.

Two Forces Reshaping the Landscape

What firms like OffDeal and Eilla AI represent is not an isolated development. They illustrate two forces that are simultaneously reshaping the advisory landscape. Both require a response.

The first is existing competitors adopting integrated AI workflows. As advisory firms integrate AI into their workflows, they will produce high-quality materials faster and with greater consistency, identify investor fits more quickly and precisely, and reduce the elapsed time between mandate and market.

The second is entirely new entrants who skip the legacy model altogether. These firms do not retrofit AI onto existing processes. They design the process around AI from day one, then add experienced human advisors at the points where judgment, negotiation, and trust matter most. This allows them to operate with dramatically smaller teams while maintaining, or in some cases exceeding, the preparation quality of larger firms.

Both forces demand a clear response. Your existing peers are getting faster. And new entrants who did not exist two years ago are now competing for mandates in your market segment. The firms that address this swiftly will stay ahead. Those that wait will find the gap harder to close with every passing quarter.

What AI Cannot Replace — And Why That Is Your Advantage

There is a reason both OffDeal and Eilla AI employ experienced bankers. At the end of every mandate, someone has to sell the company. Someone has to manage buyer dynamics, navigate due diligence, handle the difficult conversations, and guide a founder through the most consequential transaction of their career. That is not a task you can automate. That is the job.

AI-native entrants are compressing the preparation phase. But the endgame is still a advisor at the table, getting the deal done. That is what the client is paying for. And that is where traditional advisory firms hold their strongest edge.

The problem is that too many advisors spend weeks on work that should take hours: drafting materials, compiling investor lists, chasing data gaps. Every hour spent on preparation is an hour not spent with the client, not spent with buyers, not spent closing.

The answer is not to become an AI company. It is to automate the back-end work — the drafting, the gap analysis, the investor matching — so that your people can spend their time where it matters most: at the table, with the client, closing the deal.

Beyond General-Purpose AI: Why Integrated Workflows Matter

There are AI tools that can help M&A practices today. General-purpose AI assistants work well for individual tasks: drafting paragraphs, summarising documents, extracting data, brainstorming positioning. For individual prompts, the output can be genuinely useful.

The challenge starts when you need to combine outputs, ensure consistency, and move beyond isolated prompting. Drafting an Information Memorandum involves dozens, if not hundreds, of prompts within a system that must validate every output. The results must then be collected and structured as charts, tables, text, and other formats, all coherent with one another and with the Teaser, Company Profile, and supporting materials.

With general-purpose tools, this still requires a substantial amount of manual work. If not managed carefully, it can become more work than doing it traditionally. Individual prompts produce individual outputs. What deal preparation demands is a connected workflow where every output feeds into a structured, validated whole.

Successfully deploying AI in M&A advisory requires an integrated workflow — purpose-built for the specific demands of deal preparation, investor matching, and cross-document coherence.

That is exactly what AstrisNexus is building. An AI-native platform designed for M&A and Corporate Finance practices, covering the full preparation workflow: from drafting Teasers, Company Profiles, and Information Memoranda, to identifying gaps and inconsistencies, to matching mandates with aligned investors and specialist advisors across thousands of rigorously profiled European firms. Not to replace the advisor, but to free them from the preparation bottleneck so they can focus on what actually closes deals.

The Landscape Is Shifting. Position Yourself Now.

The lower and mid-market M&A landscape will be reshaped by firms that treat AI not as a feature but as a foundation.

Traditional advisory firms have something unique: the ability to manage a transaction from first meeting to signed SPA. That is a real advantage. But it only compounds if your people are free to spend their time on it. Integrated AI workflows are designed to make that possible. The firms that will lead in the next phase of M&A advisory are those that let AI handle the preparation, so their advisors can focus on closing the deal. The landscape is shifting. The right time to position yourself is now.