Back to How We Help Clients

Start-ups & Venture Capital

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.
Learn more about Fuel

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

200+

start-ups served

150+

innovation boot camps

300+

start-up experts

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
Senior Partner, London
Drives growth strategy and execution for consumer-oriented companies, with deep expertise serving leaders in media, consumer technology,...
Brendan Gaffey
Senior Partner, Dallas
Helps TMT clients to grow in size, value, capabilities, and influence
Chandra Gnanasambandam
Senior Partner, Bay Area
Helps high-tech companies transform performance by setting business, product, and go-to-market strategies that create sustainable...
Alok Kshirsagar
Senior Partner, Mumbai
Advises companies across a broad range of industries on globalization issues, performance improvements, and sustaining large-scale...
Eric Kutcher
Chief Financial Officer and Senior Partner, Bay Area
Brings engineering and enterprise technology expertise to help tech and industrial companies achieve their full potential
Vinayak HV
Senior Partner, Singapore
Coleader of McKinsey Digital and leader of Build by McKinsey in Asia; works closely with local, regional, and global institutions...
Mukund Sridhar
Senior Partner, Singapore
Supports investors, developers, and operators across sectors including energy, infrastructure, and real estate; leads the Real...
See more people

Featured insights

Article

Careem’s co-founders on finding purpose building a unicorn

– Mudassir Sheikha and Magnus Olsson reflect on the early days of launching their Middle East ride-sharing app, the importance of a company’s meaning, and what lies ahead for both Careem and start-ups in the region.
Podcast

The emerging shift to responsible product management
– 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
– 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
– 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
– With names like DoorDash, Grab and Go-Jek, these alumni-founded companies are fast on the move and on the rise—they have become... unicorns, valued at $1 billion and more.
Blog Post

SXSW Interactive 2019: The big ideas that got us talking
– Flying cars, disruptive products and winning design are a few of the topics McKinsey experts shared at 2019 SXSW Interactive.

How we help clients

Back to practice overview

Connect with our Technology, Media & Telecommunications Practice

Contact Us