M&A Intern - manda

The company

Small businesses move fast. Opportunities often don’t wait, and cash flow pressures can appear overnight. To keep going, and growing, SMEs need finance that’s as flexible and responsive as they are.

That's why we built iwoca. Our smart technology, data science and five-star customer service ensures business owners can act with the speed, confidence and control they need, exactly when it's needed.

We’ve already cleared the way for 100,000 businesses with more than £4 billion in funding. Our passionate team is driven to help even more SMEs succeed, through access to better finance and other services that make running a business easier. Our ultimate mission is to support one million SMEs in their defining moments, creating lasting impact for the communities and economies they drive.

Hybrid in London or Leeds, United Kingdom

We're looking for an M&A Intern to join manda, iwoca's M&A platform. This is a paid off‑cycle internship of up to 6 months, with the intention to convert into a full‑time analyst role.

manda is where AI meets Mergers & Acquisitions. Over the last months we've built an unbeatable proposition for the UK market of buying and selling small businesses, and our pipeline is growing rapidly across both sell‑side and buy‑side. Most M&A firms shy away from the sub‑£10 m EV segment because information asymmetry, lack of knowledge, and low transaction sizes make it hard to serve profitably.

iwoca has 150,000+ SME customers in the UK and a track record of building clean, automated processes, and manda is leveraging that to build the only M&A platform serving this market properly.

Your edge as an intern: you'll work on live sub‑£10 m transactions from week one, not pitch books for deals you’ll never touch. You'll see the full deal lifecycle (origination, diligence, execution, close) inside a venture small enough that the work you do moves the business, and you'll have AI and automation as leverage rather than as a side project.

You’ll sit inside the manda Deal Team and work directly with the people running the platform: our sell‑side and buy‑side Transaction Managers, our Due Diligence Manager, and the Venture Lead. The team is small enough that you’ll be in the room for real decisions on live deals, and the tooling we use (CRM, VDR, AI automated workflows) is being built in parallel by the same people you’ll be working alongside.

The internship is split into two phases to give you both breadth across the deal engine and depth on a project you own.

Phase 1:
Core M&A Operations (first 2 months). You'll be embedded into one or more of our live work streams depending on deal flow and team priorities. You'll do real day‑to‑day work supporting the team where it matters most. Likely placements include:

• Sell‑side execution: supporting our sell‑side Transaction Managers across the deal lifecycle. Qualifying inbound and outbound vendor leads, preparing materials, populating Virtual Data Rooms, and coordinating buyer Q&A.

• Buy‑side execution: supporting our buy‑side Transaction Manager managing the live pipeline of searchers and acquirers. Qualifying buyer mandates, matching them to live sell‑side opportunities, and helping move deals through to LOI.

• Due diligence support: working with our DD Manager on company valuation and diligence for live sell‑side mandates. Turning raw SME data into clear reports on business model, financial position, and fair valuation.

• Origination: identifying SMEs likely to sell, running our "likely seller" models against iwoca's customer base, and converting matches into mandates.

• Product, data & AI: turning manual workflows into automated ones, mapping the data schema for our "Digital IM", and building AI‑enabled tooling that gives our Transaction Managers leverage. You'll work closely with the Venture Lead on this.

Phase 2:
The project (months 3‑6). Once you've built the foundation, you'll scope a project with the Venture Lead to solve a real problem or seize an opportunity you've identified during Phase 1. You'll spend the rest of the internship executing it end‑to‑end with full ownership and regular check‑ins. Past examples…