Executive Summary

Founders, investors, and growth-stage companies routinely struggle to find vetted board members and advisors: discovery is manual, time-consuming, and produces frequent mismatches that cost time, equity, and governance quality. With an estimated 2M target businesses and an assumed $6K ACV per customer, many firms are already spending on advisor access and would benefit from a more reliable, repeatable process. You could build a two-sided SaaS marketplace that combines LLM-powered public-data extraction and structured profiles, automated match scoring, and human-in-the-loop verification, plus governance workflows (onboarding, NDAs, engagement tracking, meeting tools) to turn ad hoc advisor hires into subscription relationships. The product would focus on outcome signals (past board results, fundraising, exits) to surface high-probability matches quickly. This is a timely $12B opportunity: remote/distributed boards, normalization of fractional executives, and advances in AI vetting reduce friction and cost for buyers and advisors alike (Market Score 88, Revenue Potential 82). Competition is medium, so there’s room to capture share if you move fast and specialize vertically or by stage. Where you can realistically stand out is by combining scalable automated vetting with a small-but-rigorous manual verification layer, strong integrations into board governance workflows, and clear outcome metrics that prove match quality. Be upfront about challenges—legal/liability risk, verifying credentials at scale, and the two-sided supply problem—but if you solve for trust and measurable outcomes, the economics and recurring revenue profile make this worth exploring.

Market Opportunity

AI matchmaking and automation for startup boards and advisors targets a $12.0B = 2M businesses × $6K ACV total addressable market with medium saturation and a year-over-year growth rate of 12% YoY growth — expert networks, marketplaces, and SaaS governance tools growing with remote work and digital transformation (source: industry reports on talent marketplaces and SaaS growth, 2023-2024).

Key trends driving demand: Trend — Distributed and remote boards are more common, creating demand for digital tools that support remote governance and advisor engagement.; Trend — LLMs and automated data extraction make scalable, low-cost vetting and profiling of advisors possible, enabling high-quality matches at lower price points.; Trend — Companies are increasingly using fractional executives and advisors instead of full-time hires, creating recurring demand for subscription-access marketplaces..

Key competitors include AdvisoryCloud, GLG (Gerson Lehrman Group), BoardEx / Exec-level data (Refinitiv/FactSet adjacent).

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AI matchmaking and automation for startup boards and advisors

Executive Summary

Market Validation

Market Opportunity

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