What Is a Teaser?
A teaser is the first document potential buyers see in a sale process. Prepared by the seller's investment bank, it summarizes the opportunity in one or two pages while keeping the company anonymous, typically describing it as something like a leading provider of specialty industrial components under a project code name such as Project Falcon.
The teaser exists to solve a real tension: the seller wants to reach a wide pool of buyers, but revealing that a company is for sale can unsettle employees, customers, suppliers, and competitors. By staying anonymous, the teaser lets the bank market broadly while limiting the damage if word of the process leaks before a deal is signed.
What a Teaser Contains
A well-constructed teaser pairs a short business description with headline financials, most commonly revenue and EBITDA for the past few years, sometimes shown as approximate figures to preserve anonymity. It also lists investment highlights such as market leadership, recurring revenue, strong margins, and growth runway, along with a brief note on the process and the bank's contact details.
The details are deliberately vague enough that a reader cannot identify the company, which requires judgment: too much disclosure risks the seller's confidentiality, while too little fails to attract serious interest. Bankers often disguise figures by rounding them heavily, and they may withhold geography or customer names entirely if the market is concentrated enough that those facts would give the company away.
Why the Teaser Matters
The teaser drives the top of the deal funnel. A bank might send it to anywhere from a handful of logical strategic buyers to well over a hundred financial sponsors, and the response rate shapes the auction: strong inbound interest gives the seller leverage on price and terms, while weak interest may prompt a rethink of valuation or timing.
For junior bankers, drafting teasers is a common early task because it forces you to distill an entire company into its most compelling points. In interviews, walking through the order of documents in a sale process, starting with the teaser and the NDA, is a reliable way to demonstrate genuine process knowledge rather than memorized definitions.
