Seed VC Pre-IC Diligence — Vertical SaaS

The fund's thesis rested on a total addressable market the founder put at tens of thousands of buyers. The partners suspected the real ceiling was far lower once you stripped out firms without the budget to sustain a full platform. With the IC date fixed, they had no time to build a research programme and no appetite for an annual subscription to a large expert network.

• +Scoped the single decision the calls had to inform: is the sustainable-budget buyer base large enough to support the growth case?
• +Sourced five operators inside 72 hours — former heads of product and revenue at category-leading construction-tech platforms
• +Ran structured 45-minute calls against a shared question set, so answers were comparable rather than anecdotal
• +Screened every call for MNPI before the notes reached the deal team

• +Five anonymised call notes plus a two-page synthesis mapped to the IC questions
• +A defensible independent estimate of the sustainable-budget buyer base
• +A named list of the adjacency risks operators flagged in the same category

• +The fund proceeded — but re-cut the ownership target after the calls narrowed the near-term TAM
• +The synthesis went into the IC memo as the independent-diligence section
• +The partners returned per-deal for the next two term sheets rather than signing a retainer

This is a representative, anonymised composite of a typical venture capital engagement. Client identity is removed and the figures illustrate the format and scale of the work — they are not a record of a single named mandate. Every expert call is scoped to general market knowledge, screened for material non-public information before findings reach a deal team, and documented for audit. See our compliance framework for full detail.