How Eilla AI Closed Europe’s First AI-Native M&A Deal
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There’s a moment in every paradigm shift when someone stops talking about what’s possible and actually does it. For the M&A industry in Europe, that moment just happened, and it came out of CEE.
Eilla, a company we backed in late 2023, has completed Europe’s first M&A transaction by an AI-native advisory firm. Two of Bulgaria’s fastest-growing digital agencies, CreateX and Native Digital, have been acquired by White Pearl Technology Group, a Swedish publicly listed company with 750+ people across 30+ countries. The deal closed at approximately 6x EBITDA, and it took 15 days from buyer outreach to offer. It’s a signal for how M&A will be done across Europe.
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Stop Selling the Tool. Run the Deal.
Before Eilla became an advisor, it sold AI tools to advisors. For three years, the team built automation products for investment banks and PE funds, sitting close enough to the work to understand exactly how it was done.
That proximity revealed something uncomfortable – the problem wasn’t that advisors lacked good tools. The problem was structural. Traditional M&A advisory firms are built around senior banker time, and senior banker time is finite, expensive, and unavailable to most of the market.
The European Commission estimates that a third of EU entrepreneurs will exit their businesses over the coming decade. In Germany alone, 626,000 businesses are planning ownership transfers by 2027. But a proper sell-side process requires hundreds of hours of work. For deals below a certain size, the economics simply don’t work. The result: millions of business owners who either can’t access quality advisory at all, or get a diminished version of it.
A question kept coming up in our conversations with Nikola and the team as they worked through the pivot. What if, instead of building tools for a vertical, they rebuilt the vertical itself? Our Partner Svetozar Georgiev had been watching the same dynamics unfold across professional services, and his read was clear: “The next generation of service firms won’t just use AI. They’ll be built around it. Ignoring the trend would be a mistake.”
"We saw how the work actually gets done. And we realised: we shouldn't be selling tools to advisors. We should be the advisor."
Nikola Lazarov
CEO & Co-founder, Eilla AI
So they built Europe’s first AI-native M&A advisory, where AI handles the volume-intensive work (buyer sourcing, outreach, document creation, document analysis) while senior M&A advisors run the process and close the deal. The model operates on a success-fee-only basis, with no retainers. For the first time, a proper institutional sell-side process becomes economically viable for companies that the traditional advisory market has always underserved.
The Deal That Proved the Thesis
CreateX and Native Digital weren’t distressed businesses looking for a lifeline. They were profitable, growing, and operationally strong. But both founders had hit the same ceiling, the one that healthy, ambitious companies hit when they’ve outgrown their home market but don’t yet have the platform to go beyond it.
Neither founder was optimizing for the highest bid. They wanted alignment, a partner that understood where the business could go, not just what it was worth today.
Eilla started targeted buyer outreach soon after the first call. The positioning was precise: a talent ecosystem with proven performance, creative capabilities that couldn’t be easily replicated, and founders with real ambition to scale. Within 15 days, an offer arrived from White Pearl Technology Group, a buyer that saw not just the revenue, but the people, the culture, and the vision.
Why Speed Does Not Mean Pressure
Fifteen days from outreach to offer sounds fast. But in M&A, speed usually reflects alignment, not pressure. When the story is clear and the right buyer finds you quickly, momentum builds naturally, because everyone already knows why this makes sense.
What Eilla’s AI infrastructure changes is the front end of that process: the ability to reach hundreds of high-fit buyers across multiple countries within days, each with messaging built on deep research into what makes the acquisition compelling for that specific buyer. Traditional advisory firms can’t do that at speed and at depth simultaneously. The math doesn’t work without AI.
The Bigger Thesis: AI-Native vs. AI-Assisted
This deal matters beyond Eilla’s own trajectory because it proves a thesis that some of the world’s most influential investors have been backing loudly: the next wave of category-defining companies won’t sell software to professional services firms. They’ll be the professional services firm.
Capital is already moving at scale. General Catalyst committed $1.5 billion to rebuilding traditional service businesses with AI. Sequoia and a16z co-led $108 million into Rillet, an AI-native accounting firm. Across legal, insurance, and consulting, billions have been deployed into companies that own the outcome rather than sell the tool.
The distinction that matters is not AI vs. no AI. It’s AI-native vs. AI-assisted. Traditional firms can add AI on top of their existing workflows. AI-native firms build the workflow around the AI from day one. Every engagement compounds into the next. The institutional knowledge accumulates in the system, not just in the people. You can’t buy that with a software licence.
What Comes Next
Eilla now has 20 live mandates and a fee pipeline of close to 25 million euros, up 15x since the start of the year.
For Aleksandar, the implications go beyond his own deal.
"I believe the whole CEE region will see this as a pivot moment for the digital agency ecosystem. It was meaningful for the whole industry."
Aleksandar Ivanov
Founder and CEO, CreateX
For other founders thinking about exits, the lesson is simple: finding the right buyer is a completely different skill from running a great business, and having the right advisor changes both the outcome and the experience.
And for anyone watching the M&A industry: the first European proof point just landed. More is yet to come.
