What if deal sourcing took hours, not weeks?
April 14, 2026
by a searcher from IESE Business School in Porto, Portugal
Hey Searchfunder community,
I spent years inside the search fund world, including going through the process of raising a traditional fund myself. I know the grind firsthand: manual deal sourcing, investor pipeline management, broker outreach, and the operational chaos that hits post-close.
These days I run an AI automation practice (aizentek.com), building intelligent agents and workflow systems for businesses across industries. The deeper I go, the clearer it becomes: the search fund ecosystem is one of the most underserved spaces when it comes to practical AI adoption across the search phase, the fundraise, and post-acquisition operations.
What I'm seeing is that most of the tools and systems that SF practitioners rely on are still largely manual and there are specific, high-leverage spots where AI can cut weeks of work down to hours. Not theoretically. Deployable in weeks.
I'm not here to pitch anything. I'm genuinely curious to connect with searchers, operators, and investors who are thinking about where AI fits in the model today whether you're mid-search, evaluating a deal, or already running a platform.
Feel free to reach out @ aizentek.com or drop a comment.
FYI: In AiZentek, we are experts in claude, claude code, claude cowork and all of google suite (vertex, gemini,etc.)
Sergio
from Washington State University in San Diego, CA, USA