How AI-native founders design their exits, on purpose and from day one.
A working paper on exit strategy, deal structures and M&A in the AI era.
Second Edition, rewritten for AI-native founders.
By Dougan Milne, MP, Consortium Partners.
AI has compressed exit timelines, rewritten the deal structures and concentrated the capital faster than any tech cycle I’ve worked through. The founders who build the exit into the business from day one are going to collect the value everyone else leaves on the table.
Take a look at the first half of 2026. SpaceX agreed to buy Cursor for $60 billion, four years after the company was founded. That’s the biggest venture-backed exit on record. Over the same six months, two labs, OpenAI and Anthropic, took 43% of every venture dollar invested worldwide. The winners of this cycle are going to be extraordinary. The median outcome is going to be pretty quiet. Exit planning is how you find out which one you are, early enough to do something about it.
“A round valuation is a compliment. An exit valuation is a wire transfer.”
I’ve spent over two decades working in global tech M&A advisory, both in the US and running EMEA origination: dozens of transactions, more than 80% of them cross-border. The founders who got paid well had one thing in common. They’d built the company to survive diligence long before anybody asked. So start the exit conversation early, and build for it. I call it being “Exit Ready”: a discipline you keep from day one, so that when the inbound call comes, you’re ready to negotiate.
From the classic strategic sale to the deal structure this cycle invented. Each one has its own clock, its own buyer and its own price of admission. Tap a pathway.
There are really two AI exit markets right now. At the top end, labs and hyperscalers are paying record prices for capability. In the middle, where most companies live, the fundamentals still decide everything.
In this cycle, it’s mostly capability. Each file is in the full paper. It’s worth reading.
The lab whose models you build on is your partner, your competitor and a potential buyer, all at once. Each tier reads a different number first. Know which one yours is.
Send a message if you have a solid counter-example.