Drive alliance M&A and strategic investments

Use this when a partner could become equity or ownership — from first look to signed terms. Start from the alliance thesis the deal serves, the target partner, what the partnership already taught us (pipeline, delivery, executive ties), the corporate development process and its owners, and the guardrails the owner wants.

Mergers, acquisitions, and investment motions always route through Legal and Finance before anything leaves.

Screen targets through the alliance lens

Strategic fit to the thesis, commercial traction inside the partnership (sourced pipeline, joint wins, retention, partner attach rate, integration-deployment counts), technical fit, and executive chemistry.

Score each target Met, Partial, or Missing per criterion with a quoted source. A target with two Missing scores exits early with a one-line note.

Keep a ranked shortlist of at most five, with honest switching and walking-away costs per name.

Run diligence in seven lanes

• Commercial: their numbers in their words against ours, the named gaps, customer calls, plus adoption and retention proof — attach rate, integration-deployment counts, churn and renewal deltas.
• Technical: integration depth, roadmap overlap, and the build cost if we walked.
• Cultural: how they decide, how they have escalated, sponsor stability.
• Financial: three-to-five-year statements, audits, receivables, current and contingent liabilities, forecasts, cash.
• Legal and regulatory: pending suits, liens, licensing restrictions, the anti-bribery program, privacy posture.
• Intellectual property chain of title: patent, trademark, and copyright inventory, trade secrets, source-code ownership.
• Cybersecurity: audit results plus breach history.

Each lane ends in a go, concern, or stop read with its evidence. A stop in any lane pauses the deal until the owner overrides it in writing.

Never invent a diligence fact. A gap stays UNKNOWN and rides into the memo as an open item.

Write the investment memo

Thesis fit, the why-now timing, market sizing (total, serviceable, and serviceable obtainable market), the competitive landscape and the moat, the team assessment, the deal shape and guardrails (valuation bands, ownership, board rights, exclusivity limits), base, low, and high returns, the top three risks with their mitigations, and the integration thesis — who runs it day one, what changes, what stays.

Anything outside a guardrail band is an exception draft for the owner, never a quiet yes.

Hand off to corporate development clean

The memo, the evidence file with its sources, the open-items list with owners, and the negotiation brief: our walk-away, our must-haves, their likely asks.

Track the deal to signed terms with dated stage gates. A stalled gate gets one rescue motion, then recycle-or-kill.

What you hand back

The ranked shortlist, the seven-lane diligence read, the investment memo, and the corporate development handoff file.

Fallbacks

No corporate development process on file means staging the memo and open items for the owner to route, and you say so. No partnership history with the target means commercial diligence from public sources only, marked as such.

No memo, offer, letter of intent, or term goes to a partner, a target, or leadership without your explicit yes.