Advisory from someone who has sat on every side of the table.
Eagle 2020 runs confidential sale processes for founder-led, lower-middle-market companies. Its principal built the exchange's systems, founded and ran a clearing member firm, and now advises owners — so your process is run by someone who has been the builder, the operator, and the counterparty. The same engineering now runs the practice: an AI-powered process — infrastructure, LLM workflows, and data pipelines — designed and built in-house.
Owners for whom this sale is the one that matters.
Most of our clients are selling the company they built. They will do this once. The process has to protect the business, the people, and the price — all three, all the way to close.
- —Founder- and family-owned companies in the lower middle market
- —Services, technology, and specialty businesses with durable customer relationships
- —Owners weighing strategic acquirers, private equity, or cross-border buyers
- —Situations where confidentiality is not a preference but a requirement
A full process, run by a principal — not handed to juniors.
One senior advisor owns your mandate end to end. AI does the analyst work; judgment does the deciding.
Positioning & valuation
We build the financial story a buyer will actually pay for — normalized earnings, growth thesis, and defensible value range — before anyone outside the room hears your name.
Buyer development
Proprietary screening across strategic and financial acquirers, at a depth boutiques rarely reach: on one recent mandate, AI scrubbing and enrichment pipelines mined a 150,000-record institutional database into a verified list of 200+ qualified buyers.
Negotiation & diligence to close
IOI and LOI strategy, competitive tension, and disciplined diligence management — the stretch of the process where prepared sellers keep their price and unprepared ones lose it.
AI-powered execution
Prompt-engineered LLM workflows built in-house on Anthropic's Claude draft the CIM and run diligence diagnostics — every output reviewed and signed off by the principal. A boutique that produces at the speed of a much larger shop.
An analyst that never sleeps. A principal who signs everything.
The practice runs on machinery its principal designed and built — the infrastructure, the LLM workflows, the data pipelines. Here is what runs under every mandate.
End-to-end technology stack and relational data workflows — designed and configured by the principal, not bought off the shelf.
Prompt-engineered on Anthropic’s Claude: confidential information memoranda and teasers drafted in-house, diligence diagnostics run before buyers ask.
AI-assisted scrubbing and enrichment that mine a 150,000-record investor database into targeted, verified acquirer lists.
The best process is the one your competitors never hear about.
Every Eagle 2020 mandate runs under a code name. Employees, customers, and competitors learn about a sale when the owner decides — not before.
Lian Hao
Lian has spent 25 years alternating between building capital-markets infrastructure and operating inside it. At CME Group he led development of GLOBEX market-surveillance applications and delivered the first electronic trading platform connecting major Chinese banks to GLOBEX — then spent five years leading CME's Greater China office as its chief representative.
He then crossed the table: as founder-CEO of Nanhua USA, he built a CME clearing member firm (FCM) from formation to roughly $20M in revenue and $150M in client assets, with full ownership of technology, operations, compliance, and P&L. As a Managing Director at Peakstone Group, he ran complete sell-side processes for middle-market companies — and was the platform's top performer in deal origination.
Eagle 2020 is the synthesis: boutique sell-side advisory where the person who signs your engagement letter is the person who runs your process. He also builds the machinery behind it: the practice's end-to-end technology infrastructure, the prompt-engineered Claude LLM workflows that draft CIMs and run diligence diagnostics, and the data pipelines that mine and verify a 150,000-record investor database into targeted acquirer lists.
FINRA Series 79 · 63 · 3 · SIE · English / Mandarin
Faisal Talpur
Faisal's foundation is hands-on deal execution. As an investment banking analyst at Eagle 2020, he worked live sell-side M&A mandates end to end — from teaser and confidential information memorandum through buyer outreach, diligence, and the negotiation of economic terms inside LOIs and definitive agreements: net working capital pegs, deferred-revenue treatment, debt-like items, and rollover equity. His engagements included an $18M technology-services sell-side transaction structured cash-free / debt-free with 75% cash and 25% rollover equity.
He co-founded Ventures Market — Eagle 2020's sister platform for managed-services owners — and leads its product, applied-AI development, and go-to-market: the readiness and valuation tooling, the buyer-network design, and the brand and infrastructure behind the platform. His deep-dive research on the U.S. MSP market identified the sub-$5M “orphan tier” as the most underserved opportunity in lower-middle-market technology services — the thesis Ventures Market was built on.
Kiya Liu
Kiya brings a strong background in technology-driven operations to her role. She began her career in the financial industry at the China Financial Future Exchange, specializing in high-stakes customer onboarding, trading monitoring, and technical operational support. Leveraging this, she helped launch a new successful consulting company, designing service delivery strategies and technology product scope. Kiya applies technical expertise and entrepreneurial rigor to drive process execution and internal coordination across complex engagements.
Five stages. One accountable advisor.
Prepare AI diagnostics
Financial normalization, valuation range, readiness gaps — surfaced by AI diligence diagnostics, closed before the market ever sees you.
Position LLM-drafted
A confidential information memorandum that tells the buyer's-eye story — drafted in days, not weeks, by LLM workflows built in-house — and reviewed line by line before it ships.
Market AI-screened
Code-named outreach to an AI-screened, hand-verified buyer list — strategic, private equity, and cross-border — under NDA from the first conversation.
Negotiate
IOIs compared on real economics, LOI terms negotiated with competitive tension intact, and exclusivity granted deliberately.
Close
Diligence run as a managed project — requests tracked, surprises pre-empted, momentum protected through signature and funding.
US–China capability, in the room — not through an interpreter.
Cross-border deals fail in translation: of language, of deal custom, of regulatory expectation. Eagle 2020's principal spent five years as CME Group's chief representative in Greater China and is fully bilingual — so Asia-Pacific buyers and capital partners are engaged directly, in their own language, with US-market discipline.
A confidential conversation costs nothing — and commits you to nothing.
Most owners talk to us months or years before they sell. We'll tell you honestly what your company is likely worth, what would make it worth more, and whether now is your moment. Under NDA from the first call, if you wish.
- EmailLhao@eagle2020.com
- Direct(312) 608-5108
- OfficeChicago, Illinois
- LanguagesEnglish · 中文