Growth VC Market Sizing — Embedded Finance

Top-down sizing was worthless for a category that didn't exist yet. The fund needed to triangulate real adoption intent from platforms deciding whether to embed financial products, the banks that would sponsor them and the merchants who would ultimately use them — and to separate genuine pull from vendor optimism.

• +Split the panel across all three sides of the market so the estimate was triangulated, not single-sourced
• +Sourced nine operators: heads of platform partnerships, two former sponsor-bank programme leads and merchant-side finance owners
• +Ran a common quantitative question set, then a short follow-up round to reconcile the outliers
• +Built the size bottom-up from stated attach rates rather than top-down from a headline market figure

• +A bottom-up model with low / base / high cases, each traceable to specific operator inputs
• +A demand-signal read separating structural pull from vendor-driven optimism
• +A short list of the adoption blockers most likely to cap the base case

• +The fund led the round, sizing the position to the base case rather than the founder's high case
• +The model became the reference the deal partner defended at the partnership meeting
• +Two adoption blockers surfaced in the calls went straight onto the post-investment value-creation list

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.