Customer Stories — How Cavendish Wins More Mandates with Beauhurst

Cavendish is a full-service investment bank and trusted adviser to ambitious companies, delivering services across equity capital markets, M&A, debt advisory, and private growth capital. The origination team, focused on identifying and approaching high-potential private companies, is the primary user of Beauhurst across the firm. Joshua has been using Beauhurst for over ten years across multiple roles in the sector, including at BGF before joining Cavendish, making him one of the platform’s longest-standing users.

Origination in investment banking is fundamentally about finding the right private companies at the right moment, before they’re widely known or already engaged by a competitor. For Joshua’s team, that means efficiently scanning a vast universe of UK private businesses, verifying ownership structures and funding history, and acting quickly when the right signals emerge.

The challenge is compounded by the fact that most of the most attractive targets are private companies with limited publicly available information. Manually piecing together shareholder structures, fundraising histories, and financials is time-consuming and error-prone.

Sector analysis and target identification

When the team dives into a new sector, whether that’s legal tech, SaaS, or another area, Beauhurst is the first port of call. Its coverage of UK private companies makes it an effective jumping-off point for quickly building a target universe.

Joshua notes that Beauhurst’s expansion beyond companies that have previously raised funds to cover a much broader universe of UK private companies has significantly increased its usefulness for origination: “It used to be more limited to those that had previously raised funds — now it’s much more comprehensive, which makes it a lot more useful from an origination perspective.”

Company information verification

Before approaching a business, the origination team uses Beauhurst to verify shareholder ownership, existing investors, funds raised, and financials. It acts as a reliable due diligence layer, confirming whether a target is within their remit, who has backed it and to what level, and at what valuation. The reliability of this data, particularly the Companies House and fundraising information, is one of the platform’s standout strengths for Cavendish.

Alerts and ongoing monitoring

Cavendish’s team has configured automated alerts so that any company matching their parameters triggers a notification. These might flag exit-readiness signals based on time since the last fundraise, total funding, and management tenure. When a name surfaces on that list, the company is approached if relevant, or the name is noted for future action. It is this kind of systematic monitoring, running continuously in the background, that directly contributes to securing significant mandates for the team.

AI and the Claude Integration

The origination team has recently started using the Claude AI plugin within Beauhurst as part of their day-to-day workflow. Joshua is clear about what makes it valuable: “When the data is correct, that’s when it really works, that’s when it has value in an origination context, and that’s what we’ve got with Beauhurst.” Beauhurst’s clean, reliable data makes it a strong foundation for AI-powered workflows. Elsewhere in the team, colleagues have been exploring Beauhurst’s AI lenses, including the innovation lens, to surface additional insights from the platform’s coverage.

Mandate won directly from a Beauhurst alert

The origination team runs a custom search to flag companies displaying exit-readiness signals, based on time since last fundraise, funding size, and management tenure. A name surfaced on that list, the business was approached by Cavendish, and it became a mandate with a significant fee.

Attribution is rarely straightforward in origination, but as Joshua puts it:

Efficiency at scale

The Beauhurst platform allows the origination team to do in 30 minutes what would previously have taken a full day of manual research. As Joshua reflected, ten years ago, origination meant manually trawling awards lists and cross-referencing FAME. Today, automated searches, reliable data, and AI-assisted monitoring have transformed the workflow entirely.

What they value most

When asked what Beauhurst does best, Joshua is clear. Companies House data is reliable, clean, and comprehensive across UK private companies.

The fundraising data is Cavendish’s go-to source for understanding who has raised what, when, and from whom. And for a team focused on UK targets, the platform’s filed accounts and revenue data is something US-based platforms simply cannot match.