Mid-market PE sponsor · Sell-side vendor due diligence · UK & US · Five weeks
A four-platform digital marketplace vendor due diligence carried out in five weeks.
Four digital marketplaces, a live process and a US value pool with little public evidence.
60 structured interviews
1m+ data rows
Four marketplaces
Transaction
PE / investor
Online marketplaces
The challenge
A UK sponsor was taking four digital marketplaces to market. The largest US platform contained the biggest value pool and weakest evidence; management’s growth case required independent validation to carry the process.
The work
The work centred on the network effects linking sellers, buyers and listings. Sixty interviews, surveys at scale and a bottom-up rebuild of the conversion funnel from more than a million platform rows surfaced and quantified an unstated marketplace flywheel.
The result
An independently validated case was presented personally to six mid-market PE houses, alongside an explicit read of US execution risk. The network-effect thesis and cohort analysis differentiated the data room; the business sold. The company has since gone on to list publicly.
Engagements were won and led by Elliot Ronald and delivered by teams under his direction at Lion Strategy or its predecessor firm, Hambalt. Client confidentiality is absolute; cases are anonymised except where the work is already on the public record.