A founder who nearly lost his company in 2019 before selling it two years later has launched an exit preparation platform.
Leigh Wells, based in Warwick, founded data consultancy Comma Group and sold it to Amplifi in March 2021.
Having watched others arrive at the table unprepared, he is building The Founders Exit – described as an AI-native platform that helps owner-led businesses become exit-ready before they enter a live sale process.
Comma began as a dissertation on Wells’s executive MBA at Warwick and was built by three co-founders with a stated goal of exiting within five to seven years. It was acquired five years after inception.
The two years before the sale were considerably less orderly. A senior hire brought in to run a new US operation resigned without warning after 18 months. Their deputy then resigned while Wells was mid-flight across the Atlantic.
Redundancies followed, along with the buyout of a co-founder. For a period in 2019, Wells did not know whether the company would survive.
“A business is only worth what it is worth without you in the room. You find that out at the worst possible moment,” he said.
The relationship that eventually led to the acquisition came out of that same US operation.
After the sale Wells joined a corporate finance firm, advising other founders through their own transactions. Seeing the same pattern repeat from the advisory side is what led to the platform, which has an AI ‘host’ named Lily.
“The businesses it’s built for are the ones that rarely make the deal pages,” said Wells. “A buyer arrives with a complete picture of the company.
“The founder has no equivalent view of themselves.”
The Founders Exit rests on a specific argument about access. Most of the information a buyer will use to value a business is already public – filings, market data, competitor records, the same sources any acquirer will pull.
What has never existed is a way for a founder to see it early, without appointing an advisor and starting a clock.
The Founders Exit opens with two tiers: a free education level and a paid preparation level at £245 per month, billed annually. It is aimed at founder-led UK businesses large enough to attract a trade or private equity buyer, but without the in-house corporate development function larger sellers rely on.
Tobias Gorn, founder of Toby&Co, is using the platform.
“As a founder and product specialist, I have decades of experience in my own field, but building a company from the foundations up with an exit built into the strategy from day one is something entirely different,” he said.
“The Founders Exit has been invaluable in helping me understand and navigate what can otherwise be an incredibly complicated and, if addressed too late, very costly process. It demystifies the journey and gives founders the tools and structure to build properly from the beginning.
“If I had to summarise it in just a few words: it is a must. For serious founders, I see The Founders Exit as a necessary tool, not an optional one.”
The Founders Exit is deliberately not FCA-regulated. Wells describes the output as intended to make a founder’s conversations with real advisors shorter and better informed, rather than to replace them.
‘We’re expanding Leeds Digital Festival across West Yorkshire’