About
We help good people buy good businesses.
Every year, hundreds of thousands of profitable American businesses change hands — or quietly close — as their owners age out. Buyers who want them face two hard problems: the best businesses never reach a listing site, and it's nearly impossible to tell a durable one from a trap until it's too late.
Mainferret was built to solve both. We ferret out the owners who are ready to sell but haven't told anyone — using the one signal almost nobody mines: how long ago they took their SBA loan. And we ground every decision in 2.17 million real SBA loan outcomes, so you know which industries and owner profiles actually survive before you ever make an offer.
Why we exist
The data is unambiguous: buying an established business fails at less than half the rate of starting one. Acquisition is the smarter path to ownership — it's just been gated by bad tools and worse information. We think the next generation of small-business owners deserves the kind of intelligence that, until now, only private equity could afford.
How we're different
We're not a listings marketplace recycling the same picked-over deals. We're an intelligence platform: proprietary off-market sourcing, risk truth from millions of real outcomes, edge-matched recommendations, and tools to run what you buy. Source it, prove it, operate it — in one place.
Who's behind it
Mainferret is built by operators and engineers who've done the work — across business development, regulatory and permitting, data and AI, and real-asset investing. We use the product ourselves: we're running our own search on it. If it isn't good enough for our own money, it isn't good enough to ship.