The deal maths and the estate reality, in one system.

Corporate development builds the model. IT inherits the consequences. The two almost never meet — the synergy case is written in a spreadsheet that has never seen the target's Active Directory, and nobody finds out until integration.

ACQI is the acquisition-intelligence desk for Microsoft-heavy M&A.

It runs the deal from origination to steady state — pipeline, LOI, diligence, signing, close, and the first year after — and it holds the target's actual IT estate in the same place as the numbers you are underwriting.

That is the whole idea. When you lock a £2.1m consolidation synergy, ACQI knows which licences, which tenants and which applications it rests on. When integration slips, you can see which promise moved.

What it covers

• Diligence

  Request lists, document rooms, EBITDA normalisation and quality-of-earnings adjustments, working-capital peg analysis, and a risk register that survives contact with the deal.

• Valuation and deal economics

  DCF, trading comparables, precedent transactions and LBO, side by side. Synergies tracked through the full Sirower cascade — targeted, validated, locked, realised, sustained — with the premium-recovery test that asks the only question that matters: does the synergy actually pay for what you paid over the odds?

• Governance

  A real stage gate at every step, with quorum, named signatories, conditions and blocking items. Nothing advances because someone said it was fine on a call.

• The estate

  Discovery of the target's cloud and on-premises environment: identities, collaboration, applications, infrastructure, security posture. Consolidated from every source into one inventory, with the duplicates resolved.

• Integration and Day-1

  Waves, runbooks, dependency and cutover planning, Day-1 readiness across every workstream, and a full dress rehearsal you can run before the night that counts.

• Value realisation

  The run-rate ledger: what you promised, against what has actually shown up, tracked to day 30, 90, 180, 365 and steady state.

Where we are deliberately narrow. Discovery and deal intelligence are what we do best, and it is where we lead. Integration is planned, rehearsed and evidenced in ACQI; large-scale migration execution is a later horizon, and we would rather say so than sell you a roadmap.

Every number tells you where it came from. Source, run, timestamp — on the screen, and on the export. Where we cannot see something, the surface says so. An honest gap beats a confident blank, and an honest gap is something you can take to a steering committee.

We do not hold SOC 2 or ISO certification and we do not claim customer logos we have not earned. When that changes, this page will change.

Your first week

The first useful answer usually arrives on day one. The full picture takes about a week.

1. 01

   Open the deal

   Create the deal and the target profile. Set the stage — pipeline, LOI, diligence, whatever is true today — and everything after this is scoped to it. Two live deals never bleed into each other.

2. 02

   Frame what you are underwriting

   Load the thesis, the synergy targets and the value drivers. If you already have a model, put its numbers in as targets. ACQI will hold you to them later, which is the point.

3. 03

   See the estate you are buying

   Point ACQI at the target environment and run discovery — identity, collaboration, applications, infrastructure and security posture. It reads. It changes nothing. No agents installed, no writes, no configuration touched. Run it during business hours if you need to. Then open the consolidated inventory: every source reconciled into one view, duplicates resolved.

4. 04

   Get the evaluation build

   ACQI runs on a Windows machine inside your network. The estate never leaves your environment — nothing is uploaded to us. Evaluation builds are issued per deal against your licence. Ask on the founder call and we will have you running the same day.

5. 05

   Join the two together

   This is the part nobody else does. Take a synergy line and attach it to what discovery actually found — the licences, the tenants, the applications it depends on. A number with an estate behind it survives diligence. A number without one is a hope.

6. 06

   Interrogate everything

   Click any figure and ask why. You get the source, the run and the timestamp. Where coverage is incomplete, the surface names the gap rather than quietly rounding it away. Push on the numbers — they are built to be pushed on.

7. 07

   Take a decision, on the record

   Record it at the gate: who approved, on what condition, against which evidence. Six months later, when somebody asks why, the answer exists.

Then book the founder call from your portal, and bring the parts that surprised you — including anything that came back empty.