Corporate development has a labor problem.
Most firms never fix it — they're too busy doing the work to rebuild how it gets done.
RCG International is a fractional corporate development practice built around a simple bet: the research and drafting behind partnerships, sales pipeline growth, fundraising, and M&A doesn't need a full-time hire or a full-time team. It needs a documented process, AI doing the labor, and an experienced operator doing the parts only a person can do.
AI First Corporate Development
The Problem — Why Deal Sourcing Is So Slow
AI does the research.
A person does the deal.
Finding the right partners, building the pipeline that lands real revenue, raising the capital that scales it, sourcing the acquisition that eventually exits it — all of it is expensive, manual research work. A trained analyst spends days or weeks per target. A company pays a full-time hire to produce a handful of qualified leads a month, regardless of whether that's what the company actually needs right now.
The work itself hasn't changed. What's expensive about it has never been the judgment — it's the volume of research required before judgment is even possible.
One Discipline, Four Stages
Partners → Sales → Investors → Acquirers
Most advisory firms treat partnerships, sales, fundraising, and M&A as four separate services. They aren't. They're the same underlying discipline — find the right targets, verify them rigorously, work the pipeline with a person driving the relationship — applied at four different stages of a company's maturity.
A company doesn't need to complete this arc to work with us. It enters wherever it actually is — a first channel partnership, a sales pipeline that needs real qualified prospects, a capital raise, or an acquisition process — and the same method applies, scaled to what that stage actually demands.
In practice, M&A and sales pipeline growth are where this shows up most — the highest-value and highest-volume ends of the same discipline, and where the deepest capability lives.
What We Built
The 16-Point Verified Sourcing Process finds and verifies real acquisition candidates, investor targets, strategic partners, or sales prospects — a genuine checklist-driven verification pass on every single one, not a database pull. Every candidate is checked against sixteen specific signals before it counts as real: is it actually independent, actually the right size, actually not already spoken for.
The RCG Deal Execution Framework carries a qualified opportunity from first conversation through NDA, materials, negotiation, and close — eighteen steps, each one marked for whether it's AI's job or a person's, so the division of labor is never left vague. Financial modeling, market research, and first drafts of the CIM, the deck, or the outreach sequence come from an actual template library, not a blank page every time.
Both are built for the stage where the stakes are highest: Acquirers. The same discipline runs underneath every earlier stage too — a Partners-stage verification process looks different from an M&A one, built for a different client's specific Ideal Lead Profile, but it's the same method underneath. The Cycle page breaks down exactly how:
The Proof
Tested across 25+ industry verticals to date, the process has sourced and verified real, qualified candidates — and just as importantly, caught the ones that looked clean and weren't: already acquired, already funded, already spoken for, before anyone wasted time on them. Built and tested in a matter of months — which is itself part of the proof. A real, working system doesn't need years to show it works.
Senior-Level Access
Without the Senior-Level Overhead
Corporate development, done well, requires real judgment — someone who has actually built, sold, and raised money for companies. That kind of operator normally costs a full-time executive commitment: salary, equity, benefits, overhead that doesn't flex with how much of that judgment a company actually needs today.
A fractional relationship sized to what a company genuinely needs right now — and built to grow the same way the company does, from a first partner conversation through an eventual acquisition.
Who We Work With
CEOs, founders, Boards, and boutique investment banks who want the outcomes of a full deal team without carrying one — whether the immediate need is a stronger sales pipeline, a sourced list of acquisition targets, or a real path to raising capital.
The Track Record
Before this, thirty years founding, funding, and exiting technology and healthcare companies — bootstrapping Open Development Corporation to a $51M cash exit with no outside capital before Series A, raising $80M+ for Commerce.TV from Citigroup, Motorola, and Liberty Media, building and selling SmartLogic to MarkLogic, selling Healthwyse to Housatonic Partners, and selling IronGrid to VideoAmp.
The same team spent eleven years chairing Apollo Health — Dr. Dale Bredesen's company — sat on the board of Pacific Genetech, chaired Bellicum Pharmaceuticals through a $140M IPO to a ~$1B valuation and later acquisition, chaired OpenTV through a $600M outcome and Solera Networks through a $250M outcome, and, appointed by an SEC receiver, turned around Promise Healthcare's 20-hospital, 4,000-employee system.
RCG is the process built from having been on every side of that table.
Why This Starts With Sales
Most advisors who help with fundraising and M&A arrive at the finance end of a company's story — they've never actually built the thing that makes finance possible in the first place.
Nothing happens in a company until a sale is made.
That's where this practice started too. Thirty years ago, before the fundraising and the exits, it started in sales — and everything that came after was built on that foundation, not separate from it. Fixing and growing a company's revenue engine isn't a lesser service alongside M&A here. It's the same discipline, the same rigor, applied to the stage most advisory firms simply can't reach.
It also compounds: a sales engagement done well doesn't end at sales. It's the proving ground — the traction that makes the fundraising conversation real, the growth that makes a company worth acquiring later. Sales isn't a separate service from M&A. It's usually the thing that leads there.