Industry and Project Overview: [Project Trident]

Current developments in the M&A market:

In 2022, there were more than 60,000 M&A transactions, a year record for deal makers worldwide.
Although the overall M&A industry is facing strong headwinds; including increasing inflation, interest
rates and energy crisis, the market is continuing to expand globally based on secular long-term trends.
As of now, Europe is second in terms of transaction value, after United States and Canada in Q1 of
2022, showing its strong presence in deal making. The industry is gaining speed and shifting towards
AI and automation, which is transforming deal sourcing to become more efficient and precise. As the
overall dry powered of investors is ever increasing competition is for the best deals is also getting
stronger, investors in the private market have to outplay one another by making smarter and faster
investment decisions by using a data driven approach and by utilizing cutting-edge models.

Project Overview:
As the M&A market is rapidly shifting, and Ekwithree’s tech enabled M&A platform is currently being
developed, we are looking for a team of consultants to help us better understand the market trends,
competition and unique selling points to position ourselves amongst other early adopters in this fast-
growing market. The project consists of a combination of topics including market analysis, private
equity and advanced deep-tech software development based on NLP machine learning and big data.

Breakdown of the Tasks:

As the final deliverable, we would expect an analysis of the M&A deal origination market to get a
better overall understanding of the market which we would like to enter via an acquisition and our
own self-developed software. Please use any of the frameworks that you deem appropriate in order
to showcase your findings. Below is a breakdown of some of the parts we would like your project to
include.

The main pillars of analysis to focus on, are the following:

- Industry/market – Analysing the addressable market and mapping out the value to customers
for the product/services and technologies
- Competitors – Assessing the position relative to the competitors and mapping the competitive
challenges that impact the growth
- M&A origination value chain
- Tech-enablement deep dive – taking a closer look at the SaaS solutions and understanding
the players, differentiation strategies, and impact estimations.
- Future of tech-enablement
- Recommendations and conclusions

1. Industry and Market

(What is the size, trends and growth rate of the market)
a. Market segmentation
b. Market sizing with an excel-based market model
c. Projected growth rates and growth drivers
d. Market trends
i. How is the market likely to change/grow in the future?
ii. Are the industry margins suitable at the current levels?
e. Please include both the classical M&A Origination players like small boutiques
offering this service and also new SaaS solutions like sealk for example
addressing the same problem from a different angle
2. Competitors
(Who are the main competitors (Consulting and SaaS players) within the M&A origination
market, how do they position themselves and differentiate themselves)

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 a. Top 5+ competitors per market participant group
(USP, Size, Region, Industry focus etc)
b. Identification of barriers to entry and strategy to address them
c. No exhaustive example competitors:
Artemis, Equinot, Grata, Clifdenconsulting, Valu8group

3. M&A Origination Value Chain

a. What are the different steps and players within the M&A value chain?
b. How does the tech-enablement of the M&A Origination process fit into the
overall tech enablement of the M&A process?

4. Tech-enablement
a. Who are the main SaaS players?
b. How do the different SaaS solutions addressing this problem differentiate each
other? (offerings, pricing, positioning, coverage, size and growth rates)
c. Estimation of the impact of having a tech-enabled approach in terms of speed,
quality, costs, etc. (ie. saved hours x costs per hour etc….)

5. Future of M&A Origination and tech-enablement

a. How will the tech-enabled M&A origination market look like in 5 years from now?
b. What is your projection on how the different groups of competitors will evolve
and position themselves?
c. How will pure SaaS-players, vs. Tech-enabled players, vs. pure Service players
evolve?
d. Which technological advances will become important?

6. Recommendation and conclusions

a. How would you position our software solution in the market?
i. Targeting which customers, SaaS or Tech-enabled Service, Which
offering?
b. Which features (tech or service wise) woulddo you includedeem mandatory in
order to compete with the existing players?
c. How do you assess the overall attractiveness of the market based on your
research?
d. Which subsegments / players / trends will have the greatest impact over the
coming years?
e. How will further technological development change the industry?
f. How will the dynamics between pure SaaS and Tech-enabled Service offerings
likely unfold over the next years?

Please note: this list is non comprehensive and you are free to adjust, expand, concentrate it as you
seem fit to give us the overall best insights into the high-level questions we are having. Also we
might refine it further together with you in the coming weeks.

About Ekwithree:
Ekwithree is a young private equity investor focusing on international small- to mid-cap B2B Service
providers. As we see ourselves as true entrepreneurs and not only financial investors, we are building
the above mentioned solution addressing a problem we have encountered ourselves in the past with
a hands-on start-up spirit.
The software has already reached Minimal Viable Product (MVP) status and we are looking to partner
with existing players to soon bring the software to market.

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We are a young, open-minded, motivated team of 6, who are spread across various cities in Germany,
London and Madrid working truly internationally. We are looking forward to working with you, as our
aim is for you to learn, share your opinion and findings and have an impact on our start-up – and of
course for us to implement your advice and strategy at Ekwithree in the future!

Deliverables and Timelines:

The goal of this project is to get an in-depth insight into the M&A deal sourcing industry and develop
a positioning strategy of what we should do with our MVP Software.

We encourage the team to speak their opinions and take decisions as if this were their project. We
would therefore like to give you the freedom to choose your deliverables and to come up with a
proposal for milestones and timelines as well as the format that you find most suitable.

Deliverables of this project would include but not be limited to (Please present to us your project
plan at your earliest convenience).

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