Investment opportunity assessment | Target identification

Business need

  • The client, a European venture capital firm with a focus on investing in rapidly-growing tech companies, was looking to invest in fintech companies in Germany.
  • It wanted to identify early-stage Business-to-Business (B2B) and Business-to-Consumer (B2C) companies, with up to a million Euros in annual earnings.
  • It was open to both investor-owned and founder-owned businesses that offered payments, insurance, lending, credit rating or any other kind of banking and financial service.

To identify early-stage fintech companies operating in Germany, across both B2B and B2C models.

The client outlined two key reasons for engaging RocSearch:

  • Our ability to rapidly deploy experienced and highly pedigreed merger & acquisition (M&A) resources
  • Our unique RocEye target identification approach that has a proven track record of identifying qualified targets for niche opportunities

Approach and Methodology

Venture Capital
  • Our team of private equity consultants created a comprehensive universe of target companies meticulously sourced from market- leading proprietary databases and public league tables, several fundraise platforms and fintech events in Germany.
  • Since most companies in the category did not report their revenue, we used company assets as a proxy to map the right sized companies, after due consultation with the client.

RocSearch screened a universe of 600+ small and micro businesses in the German financial services, technology and fintech sectors.

  • We deployed our comprehensive RocEye target identification approach and shortlisted 27 right-sized tech businesses, offering digital financial services in B2C and B2B models.

Business Outcomes

  • A ready and actionable pipeline of highly relevant potential targets, with information on their service offerings, business model, size.
  • A detailed study of the company assets as a proxy to map the right sized companies in the absence of reported revenues.
  • The client was able to initiate preliminary discussions with 8 out of 27 identified businesses.

The client was able to initiate preliminary discussions with 8 out of 27 identified businesses.


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