Do Your Own Deals: How The India Portfolio Finds High-Quality M&A Ideas for Indian Companies

Most companies treat M&A the way they treat email: they react to whatever lands in the inbox. A banker calls. A competitor raises a round. A founder someone met once signals openness. And before long, management teams end up reviewing a buffet of deals that are either too small, too unrelated, or just not strategic.

The India Portfolio flips this model. Instead of waiting for deal flow, you own your deal ideas and do M&A that aligns with your strategy and stage.

By combining a curated dataset of 350+ VC & PE funds and 5,000+ Indian portfolio companies with our proprietary Deal Engine, we surface a short list of high-quality M&A ideas tailored to your business.

Ideas that make strategic sense.
Ideas you can act on.
Ideas are the first step in you doing your own deals.

Why Corporate M&A Needed a New Playbook

Anyone who has worked inside corporate development, strategy, or on a board knows the painful truth: most companies don't have a systematic way to originate or execute M&A opportunities.

The typical process is messy:

• You wait for intermediaries to pitch ideas - which are often misaligned, repetitive and brought to you with the intent to maximise value on the sell side - participation, competitive intensity, valuation - you name it. Value maximization for you - the buyer, never gets done
• You rely on scattered intelligence and guanxi - one founder here knows another founder there, someone else heard something at a conference and not to speak of the backrooms & deals within deals
• You lose time evaluating dozens of unsuitable inbounds, hoping something fits
• And then when a competitor does M&A, you are under pressure to react with your own M&A

This approach is reactive, incomplete, slow and plain wrong. And worse, it eats away your valuable time and resources that could have otherwise been used to identify and execute the actual good deals - the ones that materially change scale, competitiveness and your prominence in the market. The India Portfolio was built to solve this problem, starting from first principles.

What The India Portfolio Actually Is

There are three components to the platform:

1. A purpose-built dataset for Indian M&A

We maintain a structured, India-focused directory of:

• 350+ institutional investors including venture capital, private equity funds, sovereign wealth funds, development finance institutions, corporate VCs, angel platforms and family offices
• 5,000+ Indian portfolio companies of these funds, across 35+ sectors

Data is sourced from public disclosures, regulatory filings, company websites, news, fund materials, and verified updates. The directory is updated monthly, with many changes happening even sooner.

2. A proprietary Deal Engine

This is not a matchmaking tool or a generic "similar companies" algorithm. The Deal Engine evaluates thousands of company pairings, in each sector and surfaces the combinations that make the most strategic and economic sense.

3. Expert guidance when you want to take an idea forward

Behind the platform is a team that has run real M&A on the ground - from strategy, valuation, bidding all the way to diligence and integration. All of our deal expertise is available for you, so that when you want to progress an idea, you do it with all the right expertise backing your effort.

Together, these three layers create a system that you can trust - and actually use.

How the Deal Engine Works

The heart of the product is the Deal Engine. It evaluates company pairings through four key lenses:

Business Fit

Are the buyer's and target's offerings deeply connected or complementary? Is the combination logical, coherent, and strategically desirable?

Synergies

Operational, product, distribution, or cost synergies that make the combined entity stronger than the parts.

Meaningfulness

Does the deal actually move the needle? We prioritize combinations where the M&A can materially change scale, capability, or prominence in the market. The deal engine does not generate ticking or acquire ideas.

Market Need

Does the combined entity address unmet demand or create a stronger offering than either company could independently?

Only when a combination scores high on all of these criteria, does it surface as a deal idea.

Why We Show Only A Few Ideas Per Company

In M&A, more options are not better. More is noise.

For each company, the Deal Engine typically identifies:

• Up to 5 ideas where the company could be a buyer
• Up to 5 ideas where the company could be a target

Note, there is no predefined restriction of how many deal ideas can be generated for a company. The Deal Engine's rigorous evaluation of combinations, leads to only the best of deal ideas being generated. And this "shortlist" philosophy is backed by our own firsthand experience in running M&A globally. Starting with a list of 50 ideas leads to just more analysis and indecision. So, our Deal Engine does that extra rigour of getting you the ~5 ideas that matter instead of the 50. And you can progress each idea for deeper discussion and engagement with the targets.

How Companies Use the Platform

Corporates

Use the Deal Engine to proactively identify strategic targets, prepare internal memos, and initiate discussions that are grounded in rationale - not guesswork.

Use the Directory to keep track of sector developments including investments, developments at peers & competitors, etc.

Investors

Use the Directory to scan sectors, map companies & business models, keep track of investments by other funds, build and manage investment prospect pipelines, assess M&A opportunities for their portfolio companies, etc.

Across all users, the goal is the same: Move faster and execute better deals by themselves

What the Deal Ideas Are And What They Are Not

A deal idea is a starting point for a strategic conversation between a buyer and a target.

The idea includes:

• Why the deal makes sense
• Key strategic benefits
• How the businesses fit
• Where synergies lie
• Where risks may appear
• Why this combination is meaningful at this stage and scale

But a deal idea is not final deal advice.

It doesn't include:

• Valuation or deal structures
• Financial forecasts
• Commercial, financial, tax, or legal diligence
• Bid strategy
• Earnouts & post acquisition plans
• Regulatory evaluation, etc.

These cannot be generated without deep access to non-public information and hence cannot be in the deal idea memos.

How Is The India Portfolio Different From Other Deal Platforms

Most other deal platforms focus on getting you a long list of "deal candidates" and then the onus is on you to evaluate further to find the ideas that are actually suited to your strategy and stage.

The India Portfolio is different because:

• Our deal ideas are few, curated and already strategically defensible.
• Coverage is India-native and India-specific.
• Our idea evaluation is meaningfulness-driven. No small deals.
• You can move from idea → engagement → execution. We are there to assist you with advisory support for each stage

What's Coming Next

We will be introducing subscription plans that offer:

• The full data platform
• Deal-idea visibility
• Priority enhancements and deeper company intelligence
• Access to experienced M&A practitioners who can help shape, evaluate, and progress deals

The intention is simple: Enabling Indian companies to do M&A by themselves - do M&A that is meaningful and suited to their strategy and stage

Do Your Own Deals

Indian companies and the broader economy is entering a phase where consolidation, vertical expansion, and capability acquisitions will shape the next decade. The teams that succeed will be the ones who can systematically generate, evaluate and execute opportunities - not wait for them.

If you want to see what your strategy-aligned deal ideas look like:

👉 Sign up to the platform

👉 Explore the Directory and Deals

👉 And tell us about your M&A plans

You don't need to wait for someone to bring you a deal. Now, you can do your own deals.