Case Study
Sourcing high-value investment targets in the fintech sector for a European Venture Capital firm
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
- 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.
