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, frequent service provider use instances, and, sure, the enterprise M&A increase in 2026.
Our total audio is embedded beneath. The transcript is edited for size and readability.
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 lots 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 asserting M&A offers. How do you receive that information?
Fallon: I’ve acquired a handful of AI brokers that crawl the net. They know what I’ve written and care about. They are going to floor these varieties 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 offered to the Mark Anthony Group, the corporate that owns White Claw. Huel, a British meal-replacement firm, offered for $1.1 billion to Danone, the worldwide meals and beverage large.
Loads is occurring now, however only a few large offers occurred in 2025. You had Poppi and Siete Meals, each acquired by PepsiCo. However total the yr was fairly lackluster for M&A.
However now we’re seeing offers of all sizes. There was a number of pent-up demand, partly from privateness fairness companies that had raised some huge cash.
Bandholz: Ought to at the moment’s manufacturers concentrate on mass shoppers or on high-price-point niches?
Fallon: I’d keep away from price-conscious consumers, 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 effective 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 business. Consider Iris as the info 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 remodel the info so AI brokers can use it simply. Our brokers are purpose-built for automating finance workflows. However the Iris infrastructure may create all kinds of brokers. We’ve chosen to deal with monetary fashions, stock wants, enterprise intelligence dashboards, money stream 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 resembling gross margin, channel combine, working bills, and money balances. A shopper may ask us for the profitability of $60, $70, or $80 CAC. We’ll present the trade-offs for every and counsel 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 fundamental mathematical mannequin to estimate product distribution, resembling 15% for beard oil, 25% for balm, and so forth.
We will additionally mannequin stock velocity in December versus July, for instance.
Bandholz: How can folks rent you or attain out?
Fallon: Our web site is IrisFinance.co. I’m on X and LinkedIn. My Substack publication is “Making Cents.”
