Accelerating the next generation of innovators
Start-ups have led many of the technology, health, and sustainability innovations central to our everyday lives. Fuel, a McKinsey company, was launched in 2014 to help start-ups reach the future faster and improve their odds of success.
Fuel pairs start-up experts with McKinsey’s deep industry and functional expertise and global network. We help founders and their investors accelerate growth with data-driven consulting, capability building, and connections.
Fuel
Fuel helps start-ups and their investors accelerate growth with data-driven consulting, capability building, and connections. Our market-leading benchmarking tool SaaSRadar helps companies see where they stand against their peers on key financial and operational metrics.
What we do
Pricing excellence
Improve pricing, discount management, and offering design
Growth strategy
Find the next vectors of growth to elevate your trajectory
Consumer acquisition and retention
Implement best practices in digital marketing and loyalty techniques
Rapid market assessment and due diligence
Determine which verticals and use cases to pursue to maximize sales and the total available market
Portfolio benchmarking
Evaluate your portfolio’s performance against relevant venture capital and private equity-backed start-ups
New-business acceleration
Operationalize concepts and enable rapid growth through comprehensive implementation services
Corporate innovation
Stay ahead of innovation and engage start-ups on the most critical strategic imperatives
Examples of our work
Operations transformation
Helped an e-commerce player with $150 million in revenue, a shrinking subscriber base, and excess inventory increase EBITDA by more than $14 million through improvements in procurement, demand planning, pricing structure, and customer loyalty.
Sales excellence
Doubled growth for a software start-up’s enterprise segment by halving the onboarding time for sales and increasing sales-representative productivity by 50 to 100 percent.
Customer acquisition
Grew revenue by 30 percent for a specialty e-commerce retailer by developing a digital customer-acquisition strategy, optimizing organic search, and improving paid search performance.
Market expansion
Defined next markets for a consumer internet start-up to enter, identifying candidates to start local offices and identifying and interviewing potential clients; the expansion roadmap became a critical element in the company’s next funding round.
Addressable market insights
Prepared a defensible market-sizing analysis for a B2B software start-up to inform conversations with investors for its next round of funding.
New-business building
Helped define a new business based on unique consumer insight and McKinsey design capabilities, leading to an above-average seed-funding round.
Featured capabilities
McKinsey Academy
McKinsey Academy accelerates transformations by unlocking the power of people
Design-to-Value
Integrating design and analytics for a step-change in margin growth
Organizational Health Index
Put hard numbers and improvement actions on your organization’s health
Software Product Management & Development
We offer proprietary frameworks, benchmarks and talent development programs to help clients build best-in-class software product and development organizations.
Featured experts
Kabir Ahuja
New York
Drives transformational growth through Marketing & Sales, Digital and AI. Deep expertise serving leaders in Telecom, Media, Consumer...
Brendan Gaffey
Dallas
Advises global TMT clients on strategy and growth, helping them expand scale, value, and capabilities
Alok Kshirsagar
Mumbai
Advises companies across a broad range of industries on globalization issues, performance improvements, and sustaining large-scale...
Vinayak HV
Singapore
Leader of McKinsey Digital in Asia–Pacific; helps local, regional, and global institutions build new businesses, transform technology,...
Mukund Sridhar
Singapore
Leads McKinsey’s Real Estate Practice in Asia and Travel, Logistics & Infrastructure Practice in Southeast Asia; co-founder and...
Featured insights
Article
Is MENAP’s budding start-up ecosystem ready to blossom?
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Some of the world’s wealthiest venture capital investors call the region home, but it has not been a hot spot for start-ups. Now powerful trends are shifting this dynamic.
Podcast
The emerging shift to responsible product management
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Product managers already have a complex role in tech development. Now that incorporating issues like privacy, sustainability, and inclusion is starting to become part of their job, they must navigate a host of new challenges.
Podcast
Quick commerce pushes the limits on grocery delivery
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Just as food delivery is booming, the speed with which groceries can arrive at your door is taking off. Berker Yağci of Getir, one of the leading start-ups promising to deliver within just 10 or 15 minutes, talks about the challenges and opportunities in the dynamic sector.
Podcast
Giving developers a leading role in cybersecurity
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Cyber-attacks are happening at such a breakneck pace that protecting against them increasingly starts when developers are first building software. Snyk has built a thriving business by providing the tools that enable this new approach to succeed at scale.
New at McKinsey Blog
Blog Post
What do these 13 start-ups have in common? McKinsey alums have turned them into unicorns
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With names like DoorDash, Grab and Go-Jek, these alumni-founded companies are fast on the move and on the rise—they have become...
Blog Post
SXSW Interactive 2019: The big ideas that got us talking
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Flying cars, disruptive products and winning design are a few of the topics McKinsey experts shared at 2019 SXSW Interactive.