Executive Summary

Early-stage founders and small companies routinely struggle to find reliable, high-impact advisors and board members: sourcing is noisy, matches often produce few tangible outcomes, and many firms lack the time or network to vet candidates. This pain affects roughly 2 million businesses that would justify a $3K annual spend, creating recurring friction for scaling teams and for VCs/accelerators that need to supply quality advisors to their portfolios. You could build a B2B SaaS marketplace that uses AI embeddings and structured outcome-focused profiles to surface advisor matches tuned to a company’s stage, product needs, and KPIs, with workflows for onboarding, short-term engagements, and measurable deliverables. The product would combine automated semantic matching, human-in-the-loop verification, and simple contracting/payment rails to convert matches into measurable advisory engagements. The market looks attractive now: a $6.0B addressable market (2M businesses × $3K ACV), growing acceptance of fractional executives, and channels via VCs and accelerators that are actively outsourcing advisory sourcing—our market score and revenue potential both score high (88/100). AI increases match precision which should raise success rates and retention compared with generic directories, shortening time-to-value. The main strengths are measurable match quality and channel-driven distribution, while challenges include building two-sided liquidity, preventing fraudulent signaling, and proving ROI; a defensible edge comes from combining high-precision AI matching with verified performance tracking and exclusive partnerships with accelerators and VC firms.

Market Opportunity

Founders lack reliable advisor/board matches — AI-curated high-value connections targets a $6.0B = 2M businesses × $3K ACV total addressable market with medium saturation and a year-over-year growth rate of 12% YoY — driven by growing demand for fractional executive services and advisory platforms (industry reports and VC deal-flow trends, 2021–2024).

Key trends driving demand: Fractional executives and advisors are becoming mainstream — startups prefer short-term, high-impact advisors over full-time hires, creating recurring demand for matchmaking.; AI and embeddings enable better semantic matching between company needs and advisor backgrounds, which reduces false positives and raises match success rates.; VCs and accelerators increasingly outsource advisory sourcing to platforms, creating high-leverage distribution channels.; Standardization of advisory compensation (equity templates, retainer models) reduces legal friction and shortens time-to-engagement..

Key competitors include AdvisoryCloud, BoardEx, Clarity.fm.

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Founders lack reliable advisor/board matches — AI-curated high-value connections

Executive Summary

Market Validation

Market Opportunity

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