NEW YORK–While there has been some discussion by some in credit unions over whether a completely AI-based CU could be created and operate, an investment bank has gone beyond the discussion and is describing itself as the “world’s first AI-native investment bank.”
The bank was co-founded by Sam Mielke, 25, and Ori Eldarov, 32.
Mielke., who is now based in New York City, told the Financial Times he began his career at a tiny Minneapolis boutique investment bank, but this year he’s in line to make a $2 million bonus by selling perhaps a dozen companies with the help of AI.
‘Reshaping’ Wall Street
“In the process, he may just be reshaping a Wall Street industry defined by elite gatekeeping and a rigid hierarchy that he explicitly resents and has apparently overcome,” the Financial Times reported.
Beginning in early 2025, Mielke has been managing director of OffDeal, which said it aspires to become “the Goldman Sachs for SMBs.”
According to the Times, OffDeal just announced it had raised $12 million in a Series A round led by Toronto’s Radical Ventures, a financing that values the company at around $100 million.
‘Jettison’ the Humans
“OffDeal…imagines what happens if you use the latest in generative and agentic AI to just fully jettison most of the humans on a traditional four or five-person deal team, leaving someone like Sam Mielke to solely undertake the remaining interesting, highest value-add human tasks of deal execution, afterwards cleaning up on the disproportionate amount of the economics created,” the Financial Times said in its analysis.
Cofounder Eldarov spent six years at RBC in New York and London before enrolling at Harvard Business School in 2021, where he wanted to come out with a tech start-up idea, the Times said.
‘The Wrong Incentives’
Eldarov believed the “totem pole” in investment banking–analyst, associate, vice-president, director, managing director —”created the wrong incentives for efficiency, particularly among the middle layers who were invariably forced into playing politics to justify their existence.”
“I came up with a crazy idea, like, “[w]hat if I just start my own investment bank? Like, what if I just built a de novo bank from scratch … my own software, my own org structure, my own data, my own bankers … a fully vertically integrated kind of approach,” Eldarov told the Financial Times.
Very Specific Niche
OffDeal does one and only one very specific investment banking activity: sell-side M&A, and it started out targeting companies with revenue between $10 million and $100 million and EBTIDA between $1 million and $10 million— a modest size that even middle market specialist firm would not regularly service given the typical fee structure that a legacy banking deal team requires, the report stated.
