Most M&A infrastructure is built with one country, language, or asset class in mind. Synergy AI Co-Founder & CEO Sacha Vandermeersch argues this is why Europe's mid-market is structurally underserved.
The 2026 Vlerick M&A Monitor reports that 56 percent of dealmakers expect activity to rise in 2026 as large market segments benefit from technology shifts. “Two years ago, artificial intelligence in the M&A industry meant a sourcing engine bolted onto a database. That framing is now obsolete”, Sacha explains, referring to Dealsuite’s H1 2025 European M&A Monitor, which reports that 49 percent of dealmakers are using AI-based tools nearly every day. 67 percent are seeing significant value from AI in market research, and 70 percent in legal document drafting, off-market discovery, as well as target evaluation.
That doesn't mean AI works everywhere. Sacha is direct on this: “AI in M&A is genuinely ahead of where the marketing claims it is for registry search, document drafting, and sanctions screening. But it is meaningfully behind for cross-jurisdictional legal reasoning, multilingual negotiation, and anything that requires reading a counterparty's real intent. Treating those as solved problems is how deals break."
However, Sacha is also noticing a big gap in how many existing tools serve American versus European markets. He explains that most of the infrastructure mid-market dealmakers rely on (such as sourcing platforms, deal management tools, compliance tooling, or data rooms) originates in the United States and treats Europe as an export market rather than a primary use case.
Registry fragmentation
“Industry estimates suggest that conventional databases miss the majority of relevant private targets — particularly at the lower mid-market, where companies don’t appear in deal trackers, CRM-scraped lists, or via LinkedIn alone”, Sacha shares.
European private-company data lives in fragmented national registries, each with its own schema, update frequency, access regimes, and languages. Belgium has the BCE/KBO. France has INSEE and Infogreffe. The Netherlands has the KvK Handelsregister. Germany has the Handelsregister. Luxembourg has the RCS. The UK has Companies House.
As such, US-built sourcing platforms typically index European data via secondary aggregators, with months-long staleness on filings and uneven coverage at the small end. “For mid-market dealmakers running a Belgium–Netherlands–France search, this means starting every mandate by reconstructing a full target universe by hand”, Sacha says.
Language as architecture, not afterthought
“Most major platforms treat localisation as an interface afterthought, translating the menu but leaving the underlying AI, document generation, and search anglophone", Sacha notes. “For European deal materials, this is unusable: a Belgian seller will not sign a teaser drafted in machine-translated French, and a Dutch buy-side mandate cannot run on English-only document workflows.”
For example, a typical Brussels mandate runs in French, Dutch, and English in parallel. The teaser is in English, the legal documentation is in French (and increasingly Dutch), the target's accounts are in their local language, and the seller may want to communicate in a fourth language.
Not to mention, cross-border deals routinely add German or Italian to the stack.
Jean-Louis Lauwers - Co-founder & CTO (left) and Sacha Vandermeersch - Co-founder & CEO (right) of Synergy AI
Cross-border by default
Using the same example, Sacha explains that a Brussels-based target may be acquired by a Dutch strategic, financed by a Luxembourg fund, advised by a French boutique, with closing escrow handled by a Belgian notary. This includes five jurisdictions, four legal systems, and three languages for a single deal.
“Platforms built for the US single-jurisdiction default cannot model this natively, often struggling because of compliance screening that assumes one regulatory regime, contract templates that assume one legal system, or KYC flows that assume one beneficial-ownership structure,” he points out.
Asset polymorphism
Most M&A platforms also assume a single asset class: companies. But the European mid-market reality is a lot messier: A boutique advisor closing a 30 million euros deal this quarter will (sometimes within the same year) also work on a real-estate carve-out, a portfolio sale, art or collectables, and increasingly intangible-asset transactions (brands, IP portfolios, software businesses sold as asset deals). That means three to five separate workflows in three to five separate tools.
Mid-market economics
Most enterprise-grade M&A platforms are priced for the firms that close 1 billion dollar deals, such as bulge-bracket investment banks, mega-PE, and large corporate development teams. But the Belgian mid-market is dominated by boutique advisors and family offices, where a 25 million euros deal is a strong year and a 100 million euros deal is a flagship.
“The result is that most boutique advisors run on Excel, Outlook, a CRM, a data room and goodwill alone”, Sacha warns. “Or they end up with ten different tools, each doing something different – which inevitably ends up costing them more in the long term – because they couldn’t afford to build a full, integrated stack from the start.”
A sovereign suite for Europe’s M&A industry
This fragmentation is affecting how mid-market M&A firms find deals and investors, as it often leads to missing information. Sacha believes that a custom tool that considers all of these nuances and unifies them on a single platform for the European market can bridge this gap.
Architecturally, this looks like:
● Direct, structured ingestion from BCE/KBO, INSEE, KvK, Handelsregister, RCS Luxembourg and Companies House, with the schema differences modelled at the data layer, not paved over.
● Search, AI generation, document templates, and counterparty communication that work natively in French, Dutch, and English as first-class behaviour of the model, not just a translation layer – teasers, non-disclosure agreements (NDAs), valuation memos, and outreach emails generated in the language in which the deal is actually conducted.
● Sanctions screening (OFAC, EU, UN, SIFI), UBO and PEP checks, and AML and KYC flows running continuously across the pipeline and counterparty list – instead of as a closing-week add-on – with European data-protection rules and CSRD obligations modelled into the workflow rather than left to the user to reconcile.
● A polymorphic data model that supports companies, real estate, art and custom asset classes inside the same workflow – one pipeline, one valuation framework, one buyer list.
● Pricing that lets a four-person boutique deploy the same intelligence stack as a thirty-person team and compounds in value as the firm grows.
This is what Sacha is building at Synergy AI, and adoption of the tool has been quite high. "Inbound has been strong since we opened conversations with the market — boutique and mid-market firms across Belgium, France, and the Netherlands are actively looking for infrastructure built for how they actually work”, Sacha shares.
Vlerick and Dealsuite’s recent M&A Monitors also prove that the market is ready to use technology. “There is no other way around it. If you don’t take that train now, you are going to fall behind,” Sacha suggests.
He recommends professionals from the M&A and finance fields learn as much as possible about AI, such as what the difference is between large language and agentic models. “When you don’t really know, you put them all together as just a machine that you can speak to. But it’s so much more.”
Sacha concludes that, when modelled and used correctly, AI can become the workflow spine that connects sourcing, compliance, and execution for boutique-to-mid-size deal teams.
Synergy AI is a Brussels-based platform building Europe-native M&A intelligence and execution infrastructure — sourcing, compliance, valuation, outreach, and data-room workflow inside a single system. Backed by Start it @KBC.
