92% of Businesses Won't Sell. This Wilmington Startup Wants to Change That.

92% of American businesses end in closure, not a sale, according to McKinsey.

That is particularly stark with the “Silver Tsunami,” the generational wave of Baby Boomer business owners approaching retirement age. Ten thousand Americans turn 65 every day, and by 2035, an estimated six million U.S. businesses will face ownership transitions…representing $14 trillion in wealth on the line.

Private equity firms are sitting on $2.2 trillion in dry powder to deploy into buying these businesses. Yet only a small percentages of small businesses successfully transition to a buyer.

That reality is at the center of what Wilmington, North Carolina-based entrepreneur Tully Ryan is building with IQExit.

"The buyers are ready. The capital is ready. The owners are not," said Ryan, the Wilmington, North Carolina-based entrepreneur and M&A advisor who founded the company.

The problem is preparation, Ryan argues, and the window to fix it is earlier than most owners realize.

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Building the Infrastructure Upstream

IQExit's answer is what Ryan calls "exit readiness intelligence,” a pre-transaction layer designed to sit at the very front of the M&A process. The platform works through trusted advisors — commercial bankers, wealth advisors, CPAs, and attorneys — who introduce business owners to IQExit. The platform gives owners a potential deal range and M&A insights, while giving advisors structured intent data and early visibility into gaps that could derail a future transaction.

"It is about keeping the business owner in tune with what is going on and what their business could really be,” Ryan told Hypepotamus.

Advisors lead the platform, but it is free to business owners. Ryan describes it as infrastructure for the exit landscape, or a decision intelligence layer that makes every other participant in the process more effective by giving them the owner's intent and realistic expectations, captured long before anyone thought to ask.

"We are not a broker. Not a marketplace. Not a valuation firm. [And] not exit planning software," Ryan said. "We are infrastructure that monetizes certainty, not closings."

Ryan does not describe IQExit as an AI startup.

“AI helps us process and normalize owner inputs at scale and recognize patterns. What surfaces the risks — owner dependency, customer concentration, financeability gaps — is not AI, it's the collaboration with professional advisors. The signal that drives everything—intent—is owner-declared, advisor-introduced, and trust-mediated. No AI system has the advisor relationship required to produce that. That is a distribution and trust problem, not a technical one,” he added.

The IQExit Team and What's Next

Ryan spent a decade as an M&A advisor, seeing the same gap in the process. Owners would arrive at the transaction window unprepared. With 80% of an owner's personal wealth typically tied up in their business, the stakes couldn't be higher. The cost of arriving unprepared often meant a closed sign on the door.

Ryan built IQExit with a team that brings decades of industry experience to the startup world. Others on the team include Jason Rowe, PhD (operations lead), Erik Taylor, PhD (built the intelligence architecture), and Jesse Stone (partnership leads).

Bootstrapped to date, IQExit is currently rolling out its proof of concept to clients and will soon launch a seed round.

The company is building in Wilmington. The city is home to Live Oak Bank, nCino, and a quietly outsized fintech ecosystem.

"We are humbled and excited to be among the many great companies that call Wilmington home," Ryan added.