Daniel Rodriguez – Co-Founder & CEO of Adquiere
Podcast Notes, Episode 16 – Democratizing M&A: Inside the New Marketplace for LatAm Businesses
La Frontera 🌵 Podcast, Episode 16 - Democratizing M&A: Inside the New Marketplace for LatAm Businesses
Daniel Rodriguez
Last February, we sat down with Daniel Rodriguez, the Mexican serial entrepreneur behind Adquiere.co, a new tech-enabled M&A platform aiming to unlock much-needed liquidity in Latin America’s startup and SMB ecosystem. Daniel’s story comes at the perfect time – nearly every VC and founder we talk to has the same concern these days: “Where are the exits?”
In this episode, we dive into why M&A matters now more than ever in LatAm, and how Adquiere is tackling the region’s exit gap head-on. Daniel shares how a failed acquisition of his last company sparked the idea for Adquiere, why small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) may hold the key to a virtuous cycle of reinvestment, and how connecting cross-border capital (think the Hispanic diaspora) can supercharge the ecosystem. This conversation is packed with insights on building in public, democratizing acquisitions, and preparing early for an exit – whether you’re a startup founder or an SMB owner, you won’t want to miss these learnings.
Episode 16 Summary
Liquidity gap: LatAm is ~1% of global M&A vs ~50% in the U.S., so even small exits matter to recycle capital and fuel growth.
Daniel’s path → Adquiere: 13+ years as a founder (incl. a delivery exit) and a failed sale of Axented exposed M&A friction—sparking Adquiere.
Democratizing deals: Launched 2024; MVP built in 2 weeks with no/low-code to make buying/selling businesses accessible beyond elite banked processes.
Fixing LatAm’s blockers: Family-business reluctance, limited acquisition financing, and messy books; Adquiere pushes verified data, cleaner processes, and better matching.
Who’s buying & why SMBs win: Angels, search funds, some PE/corporates; investors favor cash-flowing SMBs over small stakes in risky startups.
Cross-border flywheel: Tapping Hispanic diaspora capital (U.S., Spain, etc.) to invest back home, starting with Spanish-speaking markets.
Scaling with automation: Adding AI/automation to valuations, KYB/KYC, and diligence to compress timelines from 6–12 months toward 1–3 months.
Founder takeaway: Start exit prep early—clean financials, signed contracts, operational discipline—so your company is easy to buy.
In Today's Newsletter
Adquiere: Tech-Enabled M&A Marketplace for LatAm
🚀 Founded: 2024 (Monterrey, Mexico)
📈 Stage: N/A - Bootstrapped
💰 Total Funding Raised: $0
🤝 Investors: N/A
🎯 Mission: Adquiere’s mission is to democratize M&A in LATAM by making it simple, transparent, and accessible to anyone looking to buy, sell, or invest in businesses.
Adquiere is the marketplace where vetted Hispanic businesses connect with trusted buyers. Companies can quickly list their business, get an instant valuation, and securely share information through automated NDAs and LOIs. By simplifying and bringing transparency to a complex and unclear process, Adquiere helps deals move faster, safer, and with greater confidence.
🚀 From Serial Founder to M&A Champion
Before he ever thought about building an M&A marketplace, Daniel Rodriguez was living the founder life in Mexico for well over a decade. Born and raised in Monterrey, he started his career at Microsoft but soon felt the pull of entrepreneurship. “If I can’t sell, I can’t be an entrepreneur,” he figured – so he left his cozy tech job after 6 months to test his mettle in sales and startups.
Over the years, Daniel co-founded multiple ventures across industries: an early app for discovering local experiences (way before Google Maps and Yelp were big in Mexico), a software development studio (Axented), a telehealth startup, a proptech platform, and even a food delivery business that went head-to-head with giants like Rappi and UberEats. Not every venture thrived – in fact, Daniel jokes that he and his co-founders “made every mistake in the book (and added a few new ones!).” But each experience taught him invaluable lessons and even yielded one successful exit (selling that delivery startup after battling the big players).
Importantly, running a dev shop like Axented gave Daniel a front-row seat to other founders’ journeys as well. His team built products for startups and large corporations alike, across different countries. This exposure helped him see what worked and what didn’t in various businesses. By the time 2024 rolled around, Daniel had amassed a rare combination of tech know-how, sales chops, and a deep network in the Mexican startup scene. He was known as an operator who could speak the language of both engineers and investors – the kind of person who might just be crazy enough to tackle LatAm’s hardest problem: the lack of exits.
✨ A Failed Exit Sparks a Startup
The idea for Adquiere was born out of frustration and “what if” questions. In 2020, amid the pandemic, Daniel’s company Axented started getting acquisition interest from U.S. firms looking to buy Mexican software studios (to expand via nearshore talent). Intrigued, Daniel and his partners engaged in talks and even brought on an M&A advisor to explore a sale. After months of negotiation, they came within inches of a signed deal – only for the buyer to back out at the last minute. It was a heartbreaking near-miss.
Yet, in that setback lay the seeds of a new venture. The would-be advisor from the failed deal (now Daniel’s co-founder at Adquiere) helped him ponder big questions: Why is it so hard to find another buyer? Where do you even look? How can you trust they’re serious? Daniel remembered a U.S. site he had registered on – Acquire.com (formerly MicroAcquire) – a startup marketplace connecting buyers and sellers. If something like that works in the U.S., what about Latin America? He surveyed the landscape and saw only fragmented solutions: a niche e-commerce business marketplace in Chile here, a small classifieds site for mom-and-pop shops there. Nowhere was anyone addressing M&A for the mass of Latin American businesses – especially the SMBs and micro-businesses that form the backbone of local economies.
That lightbulb moment had Daniel on the phone with his former advisor the very next morning: “Send me your bill for the last deal, but I still want to talk – I have this idea.” They agreed the opportunity was real. Why should selling your company be limited to the well-connected or the wealthy?
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“M&A shouldn’t be for a chosen few with money or connections. Any company should be able to sell, and any company should be able to raise.”
- Daniel Rodriguez
In mid-2024, Daniel and his co-founders set out to democratize mergers and acquisitions in LatAm. They envisioned Adquiere as part M&A advisory firm (to guide deals) and part online marketplace (to open up deal flow). Unlike traditional brokers or banks that jealously guard deals, Adquiere would be an open platform where “everyone can sell, everyone can invest, everyone can buy.” And they’d even invite the traditional brokers to join rather than fight – offering partnership programs so brokers and small M&A firms could list deals and tap into a broader pool of buyers.
🌎 LatAm’s M&A Landscape: The Exit Gap
To understand Adquiere’s mission, you have to grasp the stark reality of exits in Latin America. As Daniel told us, roughly 50% of global M&A activity happens in the US, while LatAm accounts for only ~1%. Yet Latin America is not 1% of the world – it’s a region of 650+ million people and vibrant emerging markets. That huge gap signals an underdeveloped exit market. And it’s not just a statistic – it’s a pain point felt by founders and investors alike. Venture capital in LatAm boomed over the last decade, but sustainable growth requires liquidity (i.e. investors eventually getting returns). With IPOs rare (Mexico and Brazil have stock markets, but they’re relatively illiquid), acquisitions are the main hope for VCs to get paid back.
So why aren’t more acquisitions happening in LatAm? Daniel ticked off a few familiar challenges:
Family-Owned Mindset: Many businesses in Mexico and across LatAm are family enterprises passed down through generations. Owners see them as personal legacies, making them emotionally reluctant to sell. It’s hard to part with “the family jewel,” even if selling might make financial sense.
Lack of Reinvestable Capital: In Silicon Valley, when a founder sells their company or goes public, they often become angel investors or start new ventures – creating a virtuous cycle of reinvestment. In LatAm, that cycle barely starts because exits are so scarce. Fewer exits ⇒ fewer cashed-out founders and early employees ⇒ fewer angels writing new checks. It’s a vicious circle (or círculo vicioso, as one might say).
Financing & Support Gaps: The US has things like SBA loans that help buyers acquire small businesses (because keeping a business alive and growing is good for jobs and the economy). Latin America has no equivalent support. Banks offer only limited traditional loans for acquisitions, and there aren’t robust government programs to encourage buying businesses. If you want to buy a company, you’re largely on your own to find capital.
Informality and Transparency: Especially at the SMB level, many LatAm businesses have tangled or informal finances. Personal and business accounts mix, contracts might be “handshake deals,” and bookkeeping can be… creative. These issues scare off buyers or bog down due diligence. (One of Daniel’s crusades is urging sellers to clean up their books and sign proper contracts well before trying to sell – more on that later.)
All these factors contribute to a kind of M&A logjam. And that’s exactly what Adquiere aims to break. By connecting the right buyer with the right seller more efficiently, Daniel believes many deals that never would have happened can now happen. Maybe a small manufacturing company in Guadalajara would never find the niche buyer in Madrid who’s eager to expand to Mexico – but on a platform, they can connect. Adquiere doesn’t expect to suddenly usher in $5B mega-deals, but a steady stream of $1M, $5M, $10M transactions can start to thaw the market. Even modest exits put money in entrepreneurs’ pockets that can flow back into new startups or investments.
Daniel likens it to turning that vicious cycle into a virtuous one: get even a trickle of exits going, and new wealth and confidence will circulate through the ecosystem. Investors and founders are watching closely – and rooting for this vision, because liquidity is the missing puzzle piece for LatAm’s startup future.
🌐 Building Adquiere: MVP in 2 Weeks & Building in Public
With the idea in place, Daniel and his co-founders didn’t waste any time. In true hacker fashion, Daniel – who does not have a formal coding background – challenged himself to build the first version of Adquiere in just two weekends. How? By leveraging no-code and low-code tools (and a whole lot of coffee). It was a scrappy prototype, but it worked. In fact, much of that original MVP still underpins the platform today. “It wasn’t pretty at first – one co-founder literally laughed at the UI,” Daniel recalls, “but function mattered more than form. We slapped on a nicer coat of paint, and off we went!”
The team made a conscious decision: build in public and launch fast. Instead of stealthily perfecting the product or worrying someone might copy the idea, they pushed Adquiere live to see if the need was real. Daniel’s view: execution > ideas. If someone else tried to clone it, so be it – the real challenge is doing it right and building trust in a community that hasn’t seen this before.
Adquiere’s early growth has been largely organic, powered by Daniel’s network and LinkedIn presence and by his co-founder Roberto’s existing Rolodex of M&A contacts. They migrated Roberto’s traditional brokerage clients onto Adquiere and used those initial deals to attract buyers. Every week, more users signed up, gave feedback, and saw the platform improve almost in real-time. Daniel actively solicited input: which features matter, which processes could be smoother? True to the “public build” ethos, if a tweak made sense, they’d deploy it ASAP.
This agility – possible because Adquiere is a tech product at heart, not a static advisory firm – is a key edge. Traditional M&A advisors aren’t iterating on software every week; Daniel’s team is. And their tech-centric approach also means verification and due diligence can be partially automated. For instance, Adquiere encourages every seller to go through a verification process. They use a mix of tools (KYC/KYB for identity and financial verification) and manual checks to vet listings. Buyers don’t get direct contact with sellers until certain checks are done, which weeds out unserious actors. It’s still early and not everything is fully automated – Daniel admits not everything in LatAm is as easily verifiable via API as in the US – but the platform is steadily adding more trust layers to give buyers confidence (and to coach sellers on how to become “deal-ready”).
Perhaps most importantly, Adquiere treats its user feedback as gold. In these first months, they have deliberately kept the scope broad – allowing various sizes and types of companies on the marketplace – to learn where demand is strongest. Are startups actually going to sell here, or is it mostly cash-flowing traditional businesses? Which buyers show up most, and what are they looking for? This open discovery process is happening in public. As Daniel puts it, “we’re still in a learning stage… trying to really understand who needs this the most and why, and build for them.” That’s a refreshingly humble approach for a founder: rather than assuming a solution, Adquiere is evolving in response to the market’s signals.
💸 Who’s Buying? Why SMB Exits > Startup Exits
Eight months into Adquiere’s journey, some interesting trends have emerged in the types of buyers and deals happening:
First, about half of the investors signing up are individual angels or high-net-worth individuals – people investing their own money to acquire businesses (often aiming to operate them for profit). There’s also a healthy showing of search funds and private equity players sniffing around for opportunities. In fact, Daniel notes that the majority of actual offers made on the platform so far have come from search funds and PE firms. These are folks with capital in hand, actively looking to buy solid businesses. A smaller slice of users are from family offices and corporates, and even other SMB owners looking to acquire competitors or extensions to their business.
One clear finding: SMBs are a hotter ticket than early-stage startups right now. For an investor, the proposition of paying (say) $1 million to buy 100% of a profitable business is often more attractive than putting $1 million into a high-risk startup for a 10% equity stake. The math is straightforward – with the SMB, you can start earning cash flow Day 1 after acquisition, and you control the asset. With a startup, you might wait 7-10 years and still end up with nothing if it fails. As Daniel succinctly puts it, many investors would rather own “an entire operation versus a very small slice.”
This doesn’t mean startups aren’t welcome on Adquiere. They are – and some are listing – but the buyer pool’s appetite leans toward companies with proven revenues and positive EBITDA. It’s part of a broader trend in the economic climate: with venture funding tighter, entrepreneurship-through-acquisition is having a moment.
On the sell-side, the range is wide. There are tiny startups doing a few thousand dollars a month in sales, all the way up to established companies with $5M+ USD in annual revenue listing on the platform. Daniel shared that they even have one business doing about $50M a year considering options on Adquiere – a sign that larger deals might eventually flow through as trust builds. But he’s equally excited about the smaller deals: for example, a local restaurant chain doing ~$1M in sales with a couple of locations. A business like that might be invisible to traditional investment banks, but it’s an ideal target for a rising entrepreneur to acquire and grow (two locations today… four tomorrow, improve margins, etc.). Adquiere wants to serve all these segments, from the scrappy SaaS startup seeking an acqui-hire, to the family business ready to cash out after decades.
All of this signals a new mindset taking root: exits don’t have to be unicorn-scale to be worthwhile. A founder selling their small company for $2M-$5M may not make headlines, but it can change that founder’s life – and perhaps turn them into an angel investor who fuels the next new venture. Meanwhile, the buyer gets a running start with a proven business. It’s a win-win that the ecosystem needs more of.
🇲🇽 Connecting the Diaspora: Cross-Border Vision
One of the most exciting angles we discussed is Adquiere’s potential to act as a bridge between Latin America and its diaspora. There are millions of Latin Americans abroad – in the U.S., Canada, Spain, and beyond – who have gained education, skills, and capital and are looking for ways to “pay it forward” back home. Daniel has sensed a strong desire among many expatriate or second-generation Latinos to reconnect with their roots through investment. Buying a business in your home country (or your parents’ home country) can be both emotionally fulfilling and financially smart if you see growth opportunities there.
Adquiere is intentionally positioning itself to tap this cross-border capital flow. In fact, the platform is currently only in Spanish (the name Adquiere itself means “Acquire” in Spanish). This is by design – Daniel’s team chose to focus first on Hispanic investors and markets rather than try to cater to everyone globally in English. As he explains, they’re not trying to compete with U.S. marketplaces, but rather complement them by linking the Spanish-speaking world. If a big U.S. buyer wants to acquire a company in Mexico, Adquiere can facilitate that. But more often, it might be a successful Latino professional in New York or Miami who wants to buy a business in Mexico City, or a Spanish company looking to expand to Colombia, etc.
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“We realized there’s a big opportunity to connect the Hispanic community in the U.S. and enable them to invest in businesses in the region.”
- Daniel Rodriguez
The historical ties are strong: Mexicans and other LatAm diaspora in the States, Spaniards with Latin America, Brazilians with Portugal, and vice versa. Adquiere wants to be the hub where these connections translate into deals. Already they’ve had firms from Spain, the U.S., and across Latin America engage on the platform. Daniel hints that while Mexico is their beachhead, they’re quietly working on transactions that touch those cross-border “veins” – e.g., a foreign buyer for a Mexican company or expanding the marketplace’s reach to new countries.
In practical terms, building this bridge means navigating multiple jurisdictions, languages (Portuguese for Brazil will come into play), and regulatory environments. It’s a long game, but the vision is compelling: a Pan-American marketplace for private companies, where a business in Bogotá or Monterrey can as easily find a buyer from Los Angeles or Madrid as one from the local scene. Such connectivity could unlock new sources of capital for LatAm businesses and give international investors a smoother entry into opportunities that were previously hard to access.
For now, Adquiere is taking it step by step. The focus remains on nailing the experience in Mexico and for Spanish-speaking users, proving the model, and building that trust. As Daniel said, they’re not excluding U.S. or global participation, just sequencing their growth. He knows that in time, embracing English and broader markets will make sense – especially as the largest M&A market in the world (the U.S.) inevitably takes interest in LatAm’s emerging opportunities. But leading with the Hispanic diaspora strategy gives Adquiere a culturally resonant, focused community to serve first.
🤖 The Road Ahead: Automation, AI & a True Marketplace
What does the future hold for Adquiere? Daniel paints a picture of a platform that becomes ever more efficient and intelligent in facilitating deals. Today, Adquiere is part human-driven service, part marketplace. Daniel’s team actively advises on some deals, and not every process is automated – which is normal for an early-stage startup. But as they scale, the plan is to build more of the “machine” to simplify M&A.
One area of exploration is AI-driven tools for tasks like valuation and due diligence. Around the world, there’s a surge of startups using AI to crunch financials, analyze companies, even draft deal documents. Daniel is not looking to replace M&A professionals outright, but he acknowledges that adopting AI tools can drastically reduce the manual grunt work. Imagine an algorithm that can quickly analyze a company’s QuickBooks data (when available) and spit out a valuation range, or flag inconsistencies in financial statements, or even compare the company’s metrics to industry benchmarks to assist buyers and sellers in negotiations. These kinds of tools could speed up what is typically a painfully slow process.
Daniel noted that everyone building AI is essentially aiming to eliminate some jobs. Investment banking analysts are no exception – their hours of building Excel models might be largely automatable. Adquiere sees AI as a means to augment what they do: “a tool to superpower yourself,” Daniel says. If their platform can handle 80% of a valuation analysis automatically, the team can focus on the nuanced 20% and on actually closing the deal. The end goal would be a platform where a lot of the heavy lifting (sourcing buyers, vetting companies, initial valuations, even matching the right opportunities to the right investors) happens seamlessly in the background. Human expertise will always play a role – relationships and trust are at the heart of M&A – but those humans could be much more productive with smart tech behind them.
Another key part of the roadmap is continuing to build partnerships with traditional players. Rather than viewing local M&A boutiques and brokers as competitors to crush, Adquiere wants them as allies feeding into a larger marketplace. Think of it this way: the old-school broker with a Rolodex of 10 buyers is no match for a platform that can reach 1,000 – so why not plug those 10 into the 1,000? If Adquiere becomes the central exchange, everyone can benefit from greater liquidity. This cooperative approach can help overcome skepticism and get more deal flow onto the platform, as well as scale Adquiere’s reach without having to hire an army of bankers in-house.
Technologically, Adquiere is gearing up to evolve from that no-code MVP to a more robust “version 1.0” platform. Daniel hinted that a more code-heavy rebuild (let’s call it version 0.5 on the way to 1.0) is in progress to handle increasing volume and add new features. They’ve proven the concept; now they need to ensure the product can handle many concurrent deals and users, securely and smoothly. This involves typical growing pains – optimizing the marketplace UI, implementing better analytics, tightening security and verification processes, etc. It’s the unglamorous but critical work that will determine if Adquiere can truly scale into the default M&A marketplace of LatAm.
Ultimately, success for Adquiere will be measured by how many real acquisitions they can facilitate and how much faster and easier they can make the process. Daniel’s moonshot (said half-jokingly) is to get to a point where they can say, “we’ll sell any company within a month.” Today, that’s not realistic – even with Adquiere’s help, most deals still take 6-12 months due to due diligence, financing, etc. But maybe they can compress that to 3-6 months, then 1-3 months for certain standardized transactions. If they achieve even a fraction of that efficiency gain, it would be revolutionary for the ecosystem.
As we wrapped up, Daniel emphasized that he’s in it for the long haul. “We can take a decade to build this, but it has to happen,” he says of jumpstarting LatAm’s exit engine. The patience and persistence in that statement underscore that Adquiere isn’t a flip project – it’s aiming to fundamentally change how a region’s private market operates. And by doing so, potentially unlock tremendous value.
♻️ The Virtuous Cycle: Why Founders Should Prep for Exit Early
Our conversation left us with a sense of cautious optimism. Yes, LatAm’s liquidity problem is big and complex – but it’s solvable, step by step. Daniel believes that even a steady drumbeat of small exits will start converting today’s vicious cycle into a virtuous cycle. When founders see peers selling companies (even modestly) and re-investing or starting new ventures, the mindset shifts: building a company with an eye toward an exit becomes normal, not a fantasy. Investors gain confidence that there is a path to liquidity, which in turn attracts more capital to the region. Over time, this can snowball – perhaps slowly at first, but picking up momentum with each success story.
For current founders and SMB owners, Daniel’s parting advice was clear: begin with the end in mind. If you might want to sell in 1-3 years, start acting now to make your business sellable. This isn’t about dressing it up superficially, but doing the real work: organize your financials (separate those personal expenses and keep clean books!), secure your key customer or supplier contracts in writing, streamline any “family business” quirks that a new owner wouldn’t want to inherit. Essentially, put yourself in a buyer’s shoes – they’ll pay a premium for a company that’s well-run, transparent, and growing.
And even if you’re not actively looking to exit, having a well-run company is never a bad thing. It gives you options – maybe you raise capital, maybe you acquire another business yourself, or maybe when the time is right, you have an attractive asset to sell. As Daniel noted, exits don’t happen magically or overnight. The sooner you prepare, the smoother the process will be when the opportunity comes. With platforms like Adquiere emerging, founders have new resources to guide them, but the fundamentals still matter.
La Frontera started this episode asking why M&A matters now. The answer we found is both pragmatic and hopeful: M&A is the missing link to make the LatAm startup ecosystem truly sustainable. Liquidity unlocks value, rewards risk-takers, and recirculates capital to the next generation of ideas. And it takes pioneers like Daniel Rodriguez to step up and tackle the problem in an innovative way.
It won’t be easy – cultural change and market development never are – but if Adquiere and similar efforts succeed, we might look back on the mid-2020s as the dawn of LatAm’s “exit era.” As Daniel said, it might not become a massive snowball overnight, it might take a decade – but it has to start somewhere. After hearing his story, we’re convinced that start is already underway. ¡Salud to that, and to the virtuous cycle ahead!
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“If we start getting some of these exits rolling, hopefully we’ll get some liquidity back – turning that vicious cycle into a virtuous one.”
- Daniel Rodriguez
📢 Listen to the full episode here.
Follow Daniel, because why wouldn’t you?
And check out Adquiere.co as they continue to spark the market for acquisitions in Latin America.
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