A symbol that coordinates every note that follows it.
A market with all the notes, and no key.
A business built over a lifetime. A buyer ready to give it a second life. Yet 92% of business exits end in closure rather than a sale. Every note is here. What’s missing is the key. That’s a clef. That’s us.
Alex Hines
CEO
15+ years founding, operating and scaling businesses, from main street to tech ventures. Built and sold an AI platform for evaluating acquisitions in 2025.
James Sackey
COO
Ex-investment banker with $500M in deal experience, and a repeat founder who built and sold a sourcing platform after pursuing his own exhausting search.
Nikhil Enmudi
CTO
Serial entrepreneur with 15+ years building complex engineering infrastructure, including 5 years architecting agentic systems at AWS, and previously built and sold a company with Alex.
The reason
It started with two people, Tim and Edgar.
Tim is Alex’s stepfather. For 38 years he built a tree-removal business, trucks, a crew, customers who asked for him by name.
When he was ready to retire, he closed it. It never crossed his mind that the business was worth something to someone else, so he never got it ready to sell. Nearly four decades of work, switched off like a light.
Edgar, Alex’s grandfather, did the same a generation before. Decades of drywall and trades, a good business built by a good man, gone the day he decided he was done.
Two men, two lifetimes, both walked away from businesses someone would have been proud to own, because no one ever showed them there was another way out. That is what Clef exists to change: fewer lights going out, more keys changing hands.
Start with the search.
Every business for sale, in one place. Start searching in seconds.
