M&A Origination Associate

Job Description

Private Equity Deal Origination Associate | Founding Team | Crossbeam Partners

The Tone:
This is a full-time role at Crossbeam Partners. The company is an AI-native buy-side M&A advisory firm that partners with private equity firms and family offices to source high-quality acquisition targets. This role is for the first hire, offering a front-row seat to the private equity and ETA ecosystems. It is critical for scaling the deal pipeline and directly impacts the firm’s growth by managing the most essential stage of the M&A lifecycle: origination.

The TL;DR
• Role: Early Career
• Type: Full-time

• Team: Reports to leadership, with expectations to lead a team within 6 months.
• Mission: To source high-quality, thesis-aligned acquisition targets for private equity clients by managing the entire outreach funnel.
• Tech Stack: LLMs, automated data mining, workflow automation, CRM

What You’ll Actually Do
• Outreach: Lead strategic outbound campaigns via phone and email to build relationships and engage directly with CEOs and founders of $5M–$50M revenue businesses.
• Qualification: Conduct initial discovery calls with business owners to evaluate financial health, operational metrics, and transition readiness.
• Strategy: Collaborate with leadership to identify high-fragmentation niches ripe for consolidation and map out target ecosystems.
• Optimization: Actively leverage and help train internal sourcing engines using LLMs, automated data mining, and workflow automation to compound pipeline velocity.
• Interface: Work directly with private equity clients to refine acquisition mandates, share market intelligence, and present qualified leads.

The Must-Haves
• Background: You have 1–2 years of experience in investment banking, providing a solid technical foundation, and hold a degree from a top-tier academic institution.
• Experience: You possess a strong desire to transition from traditional banking to a startup environment, seeking significantly more responsibility and direct impact, with a clear aim to develop into a principal running your own deals. This includes learning to find, evaluate, and engage with business owners.
• Skills: You are an exceptional communicator with executive presence, empathy, and verbal polish, capable of building trust with seasoned business owners on cold outreach. You have a deeply AI-forward mindset, routinely integrating advanced AI tools into workflows to automate tasks and maximize output. You also embody a highly entrepreneurial, High Agency mindset, helping to write playbooks rather than waiting for them, and are deeply curious about small business ownership and the lower middle market.
• Bonus: You demonstrate an unmatched work ethic, resilient and execution-oriented approach, and a competitive background, such as collegiate athletics, viewing challenging founder conversations as a path to developing world-class sales and negotiation intuition.