I’ve interviewed a slew of spectacular entrepreneurs on this podcast. Drew Fallon is among the many most versatile. He and I final spoke in 2022 when he had co-founded a tattoo skincare firm. Earlier than that he was an funding banker.
He now runs Iris, an AI-driven monetary modeling platform, whereas additionally monitoring and reporting on consumer-focused M&A transactions.
In our current dialog, he shared the advantages of agent-powered automation, widespread service provider use instances, and, sure, the enterprise M&A growth in 2026.
Eric Bandholz: What the heck do you do?
Drew Fallon: I’m the founder and CEO of Iris. We work with manufacturers to deploy AI brokers and automate a lot of their monetary and operational workflows.
Previous to Iris, I used to be a co-founder of the tattoo skincare firm Mad Rabbit for about 5 years, serving as CFO and COO. Earlier than that I used to be an funding banker. Iris launched two years in the past.
Bandholz: I’ve seen your social media posts saying M&A offers. How do you get hold of that data?
Fallon: I’ve received a handful of AI brokers that crawl the online. They know what I’ve written and care about. They may floor these kinds of tales to me. I then choose them and blast them out.
The final couple of weeks have been loopy. Unilever scooped up Grüns, the dietary gummy snacks, for $1.2 billion. The Finnish Lengthy Drink, a citrus-flavored alcohol beverage, has simply bought to the Mark Anthony Group, the corporate that owns White Claw. Huel, a British meal-replacement firm, bought for $1.1 billion to Danone, the worldwide meals and beverage large.
Lots is happening now, however only a few huge offers occurred in 2025. You had Poppi and Siete Meals, each acquired by PepsiCo. However total the 12 months was fairly lackluster for M&A.
However now we’re seeing offers of all sizes. There was loads of pent-up demand, partially from privateness fairness corporations that had raised some huge cash.
Bandholz: Ought to at present’s manufacturers concentrate on mass shoppers or on high-price-point niches?
Fallon: I might keep away from price-conscious buyers, particularly if I had been an rising model. It’s a lot better to pursue a high-dollar area of interest. Beardbrand, your organization, is an efficient instance. Not each dude with a beard will spend the cash in your merchandise, however those that actually care about their beard will.
We’re seeing good traction with premium dietary supplements, magnificence, attire, and meals and beverage niches.
Bandholz: Inform us extra about Iris’s use of AI.
Fallon: We began the corporate roughly when ChatGPT launched. I knew I needed to be concerned with that trade. Consider Iris as the information infrastructure to deploy AI brokers. We combine with Shopify, Amazon, Walmart, Fb, Gusto, Rippling, financial institution accounts, bank cards, Invoice.com, QuickBooks, and others.
We function like a centralized knowledge warehouse. We rework the information so AI brokers can use it simply. Our brokers are purpose-built for automating finance workflows. However the Iris infrastructure might create all types of brokers. We’ve chosen to deal with monetary fashions, stock wants, enterprise intelligence dashboards, money movement forecasts — just about something that an inner or fractional CFO would do.
For instance, we assist retailers decide how a lot to spend on buyer acquisition. We’ll analyze variables similar to gross margin, channel combine, working bills, and money balances. A consumer might ask us for the profitability of $60, $70, or $80 CAC. We’ll present the trade-offs for every and recommend one of the best channels for scaling.
Our stock planning fashions are demand-driven. We first predict gross sales, then we have a look at the historic product combine, each seasonally and in mixture. From there, it’s a primary mathematical mannequin to estimate product distribution, similar to 15% for beard oil, 25% for balm, and so forth.
We are able to additionally mannequin stock velocity in December versus July, for instance.
Bandholz: How can individuals rent you or attain out?
Fallon: Our web site is IrisFinance.co. I’m on X and LinkedIn. My Substack publication is “Making Cents.”
