Introduction—“Why Is This So Inefficient?”

That was my first thought when I participated in an M&A-related internship during university.

In principle, matching companies should be simple. Sellers have reasons to entrust their business; buyers have strategies to leverage it. When conditions align, a deal is made—that’s the logic.

Reality was completely different.

The Information War Called Due Diligence

Due diligence in M&A is meant to accurately grasp the target company’s reality. But what I actually saw was parties intentionally hiding or conveniently manipulating information.

Sellers naturally want to present their company in the best light. Risk factors are downplayed; future outlook is drawn optimistically. Buyers don’t disclose their true acquisition intent or full integration plans either.

This information asymmetry wasted enormous time and cost for everyone involved in the transaction.

The Structure Where Brokers Profit

The bigger problem is that this information gap itself becomes a business model in some cases.

Intermediaries and brokers stand between sellers and buyers, receiving fees from both. The structure itself is rational, but incentives emerge to maintain one’s indispensability by controlling information flow. The moment information becomes fully transparent, the intermediary’s raison d’être is questioned.

In other words, people who profit from hiding information maintain the structure of hiding information. When I realized this circular structure, I felt this wasn’t an individual problem but a structural disease of the entire business society.

PMI—Human Emotion Betrays the Numbers

The hardest part of M&A is actually the post-merger integration process (PMI). Statistically, over 70% of M&As fail to deliver expected results, and the main cause is not finance or business model but “people.”

When organizations with different cultures suddenly become one, emotional conflict, factionalism, and key person turnover occur. But these risks are hardly visualized at the due diligence stage. The “messy human relationships” that can’t be expressed in numbers can’t be captured by conventional methods.

Structural Destruction Through Technology

This experience became the origin of Tech Knowledge Base.

What we’re working on is technology that extracts unconscious signals from communication and converts them into quantitative data. What can be hidden in words cannot be hidden in eye movement, facial changes, hesitation in operation—unconscious reactions.

If this technology is commercialized, due diligence accuracy would dramatically improve, and human risk in PMI could be visualized in advance. The structure that profited from hiding information would be irreversibly dismantled by technology.

I’m convinced of that.

Conclusion

Information asymmetry is not just an M&A problem. Recruitment, organizational management, B2B transactions—it’s a structural inefficiency in every aspect of business.

Under our mission of “converting communication into valuable data,” we will resolve this structure with the power of technology.