dealstratum.com

What It Is

DealStratum is an M&A search CRM built for independent business buyers, self-funded searchers, independent sponsors, and small funds. It is not a general-purpose sales CRM; instead, it is organized around the acquisition workflow of “source → screen → pipeline → outreach → close,” bringing deal aggregation, buyer criteria, AI screening, contact management, email outreach, automated follow-ups, off-market sourcing, and direct mail into a single workspace. The site explicitly mentions use cases for deals in the roughly $1M–$5M range.

Core Features and Workflow

The core of the product is Waterfall, an aggregated deal feed that pulls from major business-for-sale marketplaces and broker sites, syncs daily, deduplicates listings, and filters them by buy box. A Buy Box can define industry, geography, price, and SDE/EBITDA, and is used for daily alerts and automated match scoring. AI Deal Screening supports pasted deal text or uploaded CIMs, then produces an English summary, fit score, strengths, risk points, and due diligence questions. The Pipeline is a buyer-oriented Kanban board with stages such as Sourced, NDA, Review, Offer, and Closed, and supports notes, files, and activity history. For outreach, DealStratum can send broker outreach from your own email account, automate follow-ups, and centralize replies; it also offers a Contact Rolodex, owner traces, an off-market sourcing map, and pay-per-letter direct mail.

Pricing and Trial

The plans are fairly straightforward: Scout is $39/month and is aimed at early market monitoring, including Waterfall, daily alerts, 1 buy box, and watchlist/pipeline functionality. Base is $149/month and adds around 50 owner traces/month, AI CIM screening, email sequences, a browser clipper, the full CRM, direct mail credits, and more. Pro is $199/month and targets teams with multiple theses or more active sourcing needs, including 3 buy boxes, 3 connected email inboxes, around 150 traces/month, and priority support. Annual billing is shown as including 2 months free. The product offers a 14-day free trial and states “no card to start” and that the trial can be canceled; however, the page also indicates private testing and that public registration is temporarily closed, which may affect actual purchasing and trial access.

Pros and Cons

The main strength is its clearly defined vertical use case: it brings together marketplace listings, CIM files, CRM workflows, email, and spreadsheets commonly used in M&A search, making it especially useful for solo searchers or small teams that want broader coverage and better follow-up discipline. AI screening and automatic buy box scoring can reduce the time spent on initial review. The limitations are that the website does not disclose much about security compliance, data hosting, permission management, APIs, specific integrations, or payment methods. Owner traces and direct mail may also involve additional usage-based costs. Its data sources and direct mail capabilities appear primarily oriented toward the U.S. English-language market.

Who It’s For and Access from China

DealStratum is best suited to individual searchers, independent sponsors, and small funds actively looking for U.S. SMB acquisition opportunities. If you are focused only on local Chinese M&A or need Chinese-language data sources, the current public materials do not indicate coverage. Access from China is unknown, and payment methods are not disclosed. If network access, data sources, or payment create friction, you could build a basic workflow with HubSpot, Pipedrive, or Airtable, or evaluate more mature deal management and sourcing tools such as Affinity, DealCloud, and Grata.