How WAD Capital Scales Small-Cap Acquisitions

WAD Capital isn't just doing deals faster—they're building an entirely new model to address Europe's 7 trillion euro succession crisis. And they're using legal AI to make it scalable.

About WAD Capital

WAD Capital is tackling one of Europe's biggest economic problems: succession. Every year, 450.000 companies disappear from the European economy due to lack of succession planning. Of those, 150.000 sit in WAD's sweet spot, businesses with 1-5 million EBITDA.

WAD’s answer is to institutionalize the search fund model: a platform with 100 CEOs in residence, each acquiring ~3 companies. That’s 3.000 businesses saved from closure.

But traditional legal due diligence breaks the math. A €1M EBITDA deal can still trigger €30–40K in DD fees, similar to much larger transactions.

The problem

Each CEO-in-residence needs to get to at least 5 LOIs before they're allowed to progress. That's 5 full due diligence processes per CEO. For a firm planning to scale to 100 CEOs, that's thousands of due diligence exercises.

Traditional law firms charge €30-40K per due diligence. Legal teams take months to review contract portfolios. And in one recent example, a company with just €700K EBITDA had 4,000 customer agreements that needed screening.

"It would take a legal team months to complete this," explains WAD Capital's team.

The solution

Once the LOI has been sent out and agreed upon with the seller, WAD immediately send an information request list to the seller and give them access to Jurimesh to upload documents directly.

"It creates less friction than having legal counsel speak to each other," notes the team. The two parties can be in direct contact, and WAD Capital can see in real-time how many documents have been uploaded and start screening as the due diligence progresses.

WAD worked with Jurimesh's team to customize the platform's pre-built legal playbooks based on their specific investment criteria. As they complete more deals, the key learnings from each transaction get embedded into their playbooks for future deals.

"Your teams were fantastic in assisting him on customizing your playbooks through what is that we're looking for based on previous due diligence," the team shares.

The results

The platform has already caught issues that would have been costly to miss.

In one deal, Jurimesh flagged housing allowances being paid to employees with no contractual basis, not mentioned in employment contracts or documented anywhere. "Jurimesh flagged this, which was very useful for us to address from a social security risk standpoint and make sure that we had sufficient covenants within the SPA," the founder explains.

That risk wasn't theoretical, the social security control and claim actually happened later.

Another case involved ambiguous change of control clauses in loan and supply agreements. "Some ambiguity is very dangerous in the legal world. Everyone knows that," notes the founder. Early flagging allowed the CEO in residence to work directly with key suppliers to clarify these clauses before closing, preventing potential supply chain disruption.

Scaling to 3.000 Acquisitions

The pricing shift to a tokenized approach per deal has made scaling even more attractive for WAD Capital's model. Usage is "quite high", and it will only increase as they march toward their goal of 100 CEOs-in-residence.

Their broader vision? "One of the biggest goals of using technology and during the match is to be price makers, not price takers."

And in 5 years? Successfully scaling micro-cap and small-cap acquisitions in a way that makes uninformed buyers and predatory brokers obsolete. As the team puts it: "The day of the uninformed buyer that brokers could pry on in this specific part of the market, I think are over and need to be over. Sellers are becoming aware of it, and sellers want to speak to the operators that are going to lead on top of their legacy."

For WAD Capital, Jurimesh isn't just a due diligence tool, it's part of the infrastructure that makes their entire model possible.