How August Equity Moves First with Grasp: AI Deal Origination and Execution in UK Private Equity
August Equity
Private Equity
Customer since Dec 2025
One of the UK's leading lower mid-market private equity investors, with a 25 year track record across six funds and 50+ platform investments
- Focus
- Primary buyouts in essential services and B2B software, with a strong buy-and-build focus across Technology, Business Services, Healthcare and Education
- Origination
- Dedicated in-house origination capability, with every investment professional actively sourcing opportunities
- Using Grasp for
- Analysing investment themes, building market maps, screening and prioritising targets, conducting company research, and identifying bolt-ons
The challenge: everyone sees the same signals
Origination at most private equity firms follows the same playbook. Market maps and long lists are assembled across multiple data sources, opportunities are manually triaged, and some of the most valuable screening simply does not happen because it is too time-consuming to do at scale.
August Equity had already built a market leading and highly disciplined origination process through their unique adjacency model and hugely proactive approach. But even the best research can have a ceiling when it draws on similar signals as the rest of the market: annual accounts getting published, companies showing strong growth, or funds reading the same news outlets.
“Sourcing off-market opportunities and building early stage relationships with founders and management teams has been a core part of our DNA over the last 25 years. In today’s competitive environment, leveraging best-in-class tools and software is paramount to make sure we get to the right answers quickly.”
The solution: one source of truth for company intelligence
Since adopting Grasp in December 2025, August has expanded its use across the investment process: from developing investment themes and identifying new platforms to researching live deals and mapping bolt-ons and organic growth opportunities for portfolio companies.
The team’s market maps span thousands of companies, aiming to capture every business in the direct and adjacent markets under review. Once August’s core investment criteria is overlaid, manual yes/maybe/no triage has given way to a priority score for each company, so the team starts with a highly refined approach straight from the outset. Enrichment that once took days is now built into the map directly: granular data points around service offerings, ownership structures, growth metrics, and exit readiness signals.
“When we finish a mapping exercise, I want to believe there isn’t a company in that space we haven’t seen. That used to be an aspiration. Now it’s the standard we hold every search to.”
Inside August Equity's AI stack: Claude, the August Brain and Grasp
August has made AI central to how the firm works. All workflows run on Claude and the team is building what it calls the August Brain: its own intelligence layer, with skills built in-house, ensuring full oversight across systems & software interoperability. When it comes to appraising new deals, all opportunities are triaged and scored against every deal the firm has ever looked at, completed or passed on.
In that stack, Grasp is the piece August has chosen for company intelligence: the source of truth for market mapping, company information and sourcing, connected directly into Claude through Grasp's MCP connector so the team can call on it from inside its own environment. For the deep work of building market maps, the team works in Grasp itself; for quicker, isolated research tasks, it calls Grasp through Claude.
“We can now build almost anything ourselves using Claude. But we chose Grasp for market mapping and company intelligence because it does that better than anything else we tested.”
The result: 3x more relevant targets, reached before the process starts
The edge shows up in three ways. The research includes a comprehensive universe with granular data points on each company. The scoring tells the team exactly where to spend its time, with clear rules that a company crossing the threshold meets their strict criteria. And by the time August engages, the team knows the market, their competitors, the roll-up potential, and where it could take the business, so the first conversation with a management team is always a substantive one.
All of it happens faster, too: core tasks such as target list generation and bottom-up market mapping now take around 80% less time than before Grasp. This allows August to then focus more quickly on strategy and building relationships with founders in markets in which it already has pre-qualified theses.
“As a PE house we pride ourselves on our agility and looking forwards and it’s our aspiration to be at the forefront of tech adoption in the market. As we look to maintain a competitive edge, tools like Grasp augment our time, capacity, and output, and importantly allow us to spend more time with founders, entrepreneurs, and management teams, building the relationships and insights that ultimately drive better investment outcomes.”
About
August Equity is a leading UK lower mid-market private equity firm with a 25-year track record of partnering with ambitious management teams to build market-leading businesses. The firm specialises in investing across Business Services, Technology, Healthcare and Education, supporting sustainable growth and strategic value creation. augustequity.com
Grasp is an AI-native deal origination and execution workflow tool used by 300+ of the world's leading private equity firms, investment banks, and management consultancies. Grasp's AI agents are purpose-built to work with the company's proprietary private company datasets and signals, enabling customers to find, evaluate, and close deals that others miss.