Seal is a CRM for business brokers, built by two people in Brooklyn.
We're Guilherme Soares and Carter Klein.
Before Seal, we both worked at a personal finance app through its ~$500M sale to a publicly traded company.
Guilherme (G) Soares
Co-founder and CEO
At our last company, G worked in corporate development through its sale and then became Chief of Staff to the CEO. Before that, he spent two years at JPMorgan in banking and credit, then two years at Hercules Capital underwriting loans to technology companies.
G grew up in small towns in Mississippi and Kentucky. He knew the families who owned the restaurants and the shops, and he saw what it did to a town when one of them closed. Keeping those businesses open is what he cares about.
Carter Klein
Co-founder and CTO
Carter has spent his career building in fintech. At our last company, he worked on underwriting systems powering billions of dollars in cash advances. Before that, he was the first engineer at another fintech startup, and a part of Capital One's LMM banking tech team.
His family has worked for small business across New York City for four generations, from the Garment District to the Fulton Street Fish Market to Wall Street, and he's passionate about using tech to create financial opportunities for his generation and beyond.
Why we built Seal
A lot of selling a business is follow-up and paperwork
When our last company was sold, we had bankers and lawyers, but nobody on staff to handle the buyers' due diligence, so G took it on. He ran the data room, answered buyers' questions and compared the incoming LOIs. Most of the job was keeping everyone on the same page and keeping the deal moving.
Carter was building the software underneath that company. His systems took in customers' financial records from hundreds of banks and turned them into numbers the company could act on. A sale runs on the same problem, except the records show up as tax returns, P&Ls, bank statements and a lease, in whatever shape the seller keeps them.
On a Main Street sale the broker does both jobs, usually across several listings at once. Both come second to the work only the broker can do, which is keeping a nervous seller and a first-time buyer in the deal until it closes.
Between us we had already done both of those jobs, so we knew what to build. We started Seal to take the follow-up and the paperwork off brokers' desks, so more of their day goes to the buyer and the seller.
Some of the people coming into this industry say software will replace the broker. We don't think it can. A seller is handing over the thing they spent thirty years building, and they choose a person to do that, not a tool. What Seal takes off the broker's desk is the part that was never the job, and the CRM is just the first step.
See how Seal works →See something you think we could do better?
We build software for business brokers and M&A advisors. We want to build the best product we can for you, and we're always asking questions and learning more.