Felipe Cuerqueda bought an RPA consultancy for $1.5M weeks before ChatGPT dropped

The Setup Felipe Cuerqueda grew up in Mexico City, trained as an engineer, then spent four and a half years at Goldman Sachs across Mexico City and New York. An MBA at MIT Sloan exposed him to search funds. He interned at Relay Investments in Boston in 2017, turned down his Goldman return offer, and joined Relay full-time in 2018 as a search fund investor. He sat on the investor side for roughly three and a half years, valuing deals and coaching searchers, before concluding that the best investors he met had scars of their own. In 2020 he met Antonio, then at Stanford GSB. They spent a year circling each other before committing to a partner search in spring 2021. Felipe moved to Texas with Relay and most of his other investors backing him. The partnership was built around complementary skill sets, not redundancy. Felipe owned the back half of the funnel: finance, diligence, LOIs, negotiation. Antonio owned lead generation at the top. They ran one funnel, not two, optimizing for quality rather than doubling the universe. The Deal Over twelve months they ran 155 email campaigns. 154 were industry-vertical campaigns. One was geographic, targeted at the Austin business community. That lone geographic campaign surfaced Beeker, an IT services firm focused on robotic process automation. The seller was Latino, which gave them cultural rapport from the first meeting. A broker had already been engaged and was pushing the seller toward a $20-22M ask. The seller had done his own homework on IT services comparables with mixed recurring and non-recurring revenue and refused the broker's number. Felipe and Antonio sat down with him, asked what he actually wanted (price, rollover, structure), and built the LOI around his wish list. They closed at roughly $1.5M in enterprise value and pulled the deal off the market before teasers went out. Four deals went under LOI during the search. One killed, one bought, two handed off to other searchers under lead-transfer agreements at 1% of EV in cash to the search fund entity plus 1% of EV in acquired-company shares to Felipe and Antonio personally. Revenue mix at close: roughly 20% license resale of UiPath software, 30% non-recurring bot development on eight-week sprints, and 50% staff augmentation on three-to-twelve-month engagements where customers directed internal automation roadmaps and Beeker supplied developers. Operating Moves ChatGPT launched weeks after close. The teaser Felipe used to raise capital never mentioned AI. Within months the ground under RPA shifted. Rules-based bots that cost eight weeks and six figures to build started looking expensive next to LLM-driven alternatives customers could prototype themselves. Felipe and Antonio chose to rebuild rather than defend. They repositioned Beeker from an RPA implementation partner to an AI automation firm building and deploying AI agents. The staff-augmentation line bought them time because those engagements were contracted and predictable. The non-recurring bot work absorbed the impact first. License resale through UiPath became a smaller part of the mix as customer demand moved toward agentic workflows. The...