Off-market deals are a needle in a haystack.
AI makes the haystack searchable.

“By 2035, roughly 6 million small and medium-size businesses will face ownership transitions.”

McKinsey & Company, The Great Ownership Transfer (2026) · up to $5 trillion in enterprise value

Millions of owners are aging out with no succession plan, and almost none of them will ever call a broker. That market has always been too large and too quiet to work through by hand. AI reads all of it in a single pass and scores every business on how likely its owner is to sell, so you open a ranked shortlist instead of a phone book.

Search your market See how it works

The funnel

Cheap signals sift the whole haystack.
Deep AI is spent only on the needles.

Find every business

Pick any trade and any town, or sweep everything at once. Prospector pulls and deduplicates every candidate from OpenStreetMap, Google, and Yelp, covering your whole market in one query.

cost per business: ~$0

Score every business

AI scores every business 0 to 100 for sell-propensity, weighing dozens of signals across many sources: business age, website staleness, reputation quality, contactability, and more. Chains and franchises are filtered out.

cost per business: ~$0

Deep-dive the best

Top candidates get the deep-AI treatment. It reads state registry records, employee counts, and firmographics into a full acquisition dossier, then drafts personalized outreach.

spent only on winners

Reach out at scale

Turn dossiers into first contact: batch-send personalized emails or launch AI phone calls across a whole list. Every message is yours to review, and nothing goes out without your click.

Pro: email · Ultra: AI calls

The signals

What a motivated seller looks like from the outside

Business age

Registry filings, "since 1989" on the homepage, copyright ranges. Owner tenure is the strongest retirement predictor there is.

Digital staleness

Copyright frozen years ago, no HTTPS, not mobile friendly, DIY site builders. A checked-out web presence often means a checked-out owner.

Reputation quality

You want a great business whose owner is winding down, not a business in decline. Strong ratings across many reviews raise the score; weak ratings sink it.

Registry records

Secretary of State registration dates, entity status, and registered agents corroborate age and surface the actual owner's name.

Team size

The 5 to 50 employee sweet spot: big enough to run without the owner on the truck, small enough to buy without a fund.

Contactability

Phones and emails scraped from public pages, so a promising dossier turns into a conversation instead of a dead end.

Who it's for

Built for buyers who do their own hunting

Searchers & ETA buyers

Self-funded and traditional searchers sourcing their one great business. The institutional tools start at $20k a year and ignore your size range. This one starts at $14.99 a month.

Holding companies

Serial acquirers building a portfolio of boring, durable local businesses. Sweep whole metros by trade, bank every result, and work the top of the list every week.

Small PE & family offices

Analysts who need proprietary deal flow below the radar of the auction processes. Export, enrich, and feed your own pipeline.

Outreach

From dossier to first coffee

Select the businesses at the top of your list and Prospector writes a separate email for each one from its own dossier: the year it was founded, the reputation it built, the detail that makes it obvious this is not a mail merge. Then they open in your own inbox. An owner who deletes broker blasts unread sees a note from a person at a real address instead of a no-reply corporate sender, and every reply comes straight back to you. Nothing sends without your click.

AI-drafted emails, in bulk · Pro
To owner@cascadecomfort.com
Subject A note from a private buyer, not a broker
Hi, my name is [YOUR NAME]. I am an individual buyer, not a broker, looking to own one great HVAC business in Everett for the long term.

Cascade Comfort has clearly been built with care since 1994, and the 4.8 star reputation speaks for itself...
Open 12 in GmailOne email per business, each from its dossier. Sends from your own address, replies come to you.
AI phone call · Ultra
☏
Cascade Comfort Heating
warm, disclosed script · voicemail variant
"Hi, my name is [YOUR NAME]. I am a private buyer, not a broker, and I am calling about Cascade Comfort Heating..."
Place callOne click per call, never a blaster. You own list compliance.

How it compares

Everyone else shows you the businesses that are already for sale.

Listing sites show you what is on the market, which is the same list every other buyer is working. Institutional platforms search off-market properly, but they are priced for funds and start well above the size most buyers want. Prospector aims squarely at the gap.

Capability Business Prospector Listing marketplacesBizBuySell, BizQuest Institutional platformsGrata, Sourcescrub Doing it by handlists, brokers, cold calls
Businesses you see Not for saleOwners who never listed Already listedEvery buyer sees the same page Not for saleMostly mid-market and up Whatever you can reachOne at a time
Target size $500k to $5M revenueOwner-operated main street MixedWhatever is listed that week Larger companiesBuilt for funds and corp dev AnythingLimited by your hours
Ranks owners by likelihood to sell Yes0 to 100, with the reasoning shown No Growth and firmographic signals No
Drafts the first approach YesPer-business email and call script No Contact data, you write it You write every one
Start today Sign up and searchNo demo, no sales call, no contract Free to browse listings Sales call and demo first Your own time
Price on the website From $14.99/moListed publicly, cancel anytime Free to browse Contact salesAnnual contracts Broker fees on success

Comparison reflects each product’s publicly described positioning. Institutional platforms are genuinely stronger on large-company coverage; this is about a different end of the market.

FAQ

Fair questions

Where does the data come from?

Public sources: OpenStreetMap, Google and Yelp listings, the businesses' own public websites, and official business registries (US Secretary of State filings). Prospector reads what anyone could read; it just reads a lot of it and remembers everything.

Which countries does it cover?

Anywhere the underlying signals exist. Discovery through OpenStreetMap and Google works worldwide, Yelp adds coverage in 30+ countries, and website age and staleness signals are global. US businesses additionally get Secretary of State registry data on deep dives.

Is this legal?

Discovery and scoring use public data. Cold acquisition email is legal in the US under CAN-SPAM on an opt-out basis: drafts include your postal address and honor opt-outs. For phone outreach, you are responsible for your call list and TCPA compliance, especially for mobile numbers. Outside the US, stricter opt-in rules can apply to cold email (GDPR and PECR in Europe, CASL in Canada); you are responsible for compliance in your jurisdiction. Prospector never sends anything without an explicit click from you.

What exactly is a deep dive?

One business gets the full treatment: registry lookup (registration date, status, registered agent), firmographic enrichment (team size), a fresh website scrape, an AI-written dossier with a sell-likelihood estimate, and a personalized outreach draft. It becomes part of your permanent history.

Do owners know they are listed?

Prospector only aggregates what is already public. Nothing is published about any business; dossiers are private to your account and meant to start a respectful, human conversation.

What does it cost?

Basic is $14.99 a month as an introductory price, down from $44.99: 25 businesses per search, 1,000 a month, the sell-propensity score and every signal behind it, estimated value on each one, and 3 deep-dive dossiers a month. Pro at $99 and Ultra at $299 raise every limit and add outreach drafting and CSV export. Signing up is free and takes a minute; running a search is the part that needs a plan.

Can I cancel anytime?

Yes. Billing is handled by Stripe and you can cancel from your account page in two clicks, at any time, and keep access through the period you paid for.

The next great business you buy is not for sale today.

One query tonight beats a year of waiting on brokers. Every business in your market, ranked by how likely its owner is to sell, from $14.99 a month.

Search your market