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-£10m 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-£10m 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.
The team
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 role
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 workstreams 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 of the kind of project we'd back: a model that scores acquisition targets against a buyer's mandate, an AI workflow that drafts a first-pass IM from raw accounts, or a structured outbound channel into a new vendor segment.
Who you are
You're interested in M&A, FinTech, or building things from scratch, and you want to do all three at once. Most importantly, you're smart, motivated, humble, and have a growth mindset.
You are need-driven. You take whatever is in front of you and move it forward, whether that's fixing a broken spreadsheet, calling a vendor, or cleaning up CRM data. You don't wait to be told what's important.
You are financially literate. You can read a P&L and a balance sheet, spot what's odd, and ask the question that surfaces the real story behind the numbers.
You are tech-curious. You bring your own stack, you're already using AI tools to multiply your output, and you treat any manual workflow you see as a candidate for automation.
You are a clear communicator. M&A runs on trust. You write professional emails, you're not afraid to pick up the phone, and you can hold a conversation with a 60-year-old business owner about the company they spent 30 years building.
The requirements
Available for a full-time, off-cycle placement of up to 6 months.
Strong academic background, open to all disciplines though Finance, Economics, or Business preferred.
Any experience, projects, or initiatives that show genuine M&A, FinTech, or entrepreneurial interest. We care more about evidence of initiative than a polished CV.
Bonus: experience working with SME data, financing, or M&A workflows.
The salary & conversion
This is a paid internship with annual compensation of £30k. If it goes well and there's a fit on both sides, we'd convert you into a permanent role on the manda team, with compensation re-benchmarked against the new position.
The culture
At iwoca, the best idea wins. We model our culture on independent thinking, challenging untested logic, and evidence-based decisions. We prioritise learning and growth, and give people the autonomy to develop in the direction that makes them most effective.
We're a tech company and believe in the power of AI to help us work faster and better. We provide the infrastructure where every iwocan always has access to the best models and where those models have access to all of our data. We will help our people to learn how to use and grow with the new tools available to them.
The offices
We put a lot of effort into making iwoca a great place to work:
Offices in London, Leeds, Berlin, and Frankfurt with plenty of drinks and snacks.
Events and community-led groups, including running groups, padel, and monthly ping-pong and pool competitions.
The benefits
Flexible working hours.
Medical insurance from Vitality, including discounted gym membership.
A private GP service (separate from Vitality) for you, your partner, and your dependents.
25 days’ holiday per year, an extra day off for your birthday, the option to buy or sell an additional five days of annual leave, and unlimited unpaid leave.
A one-month, fully paid sabbatical after four years.
Instant access to external counselling and therapy sessions for team members that need emotional or mental health support.
3% Pension contributions on total earnings.
An employee equity incentive scheme.
Generous parental leave and a nursery tax benefit scheme to help you save money.
Electric car scheme and cycle to work scheme.
Two company retreats a year: we’ve been to France, Italy, Spain, and further afield.
And to make sure we all keep learning, we offer:
A learning and development budget for everyone.
Company-wide talks with internal and external speakers.
Access to learning platforms like Treehouse.
Useful links:
benefits & policies
Compensation Range: £30K
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