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How We Solve It
We go through a deep dive into the business, looking at 7 key areas.
Product-Market Fit
Does the retention and cohort data show genuine demand or a product customers use but do not depend on? We look for evidence that a specific segment needs this badly enough to adopt, stay, and expand without being pushed.
Unit Economics
We rebuild CAC by acquisition channel and LTV by cohort. Blended metrics are accurate on average and dangerous in practice. The question we are answering: does each incremental customer create real economic value or does growth hide value destruction?
Growth Logic
We model the revenue bridge against realistic hiring ramps, channel economics, and sales capacity. The test is not whether the plan is internally consistent. It is whether growth compounds or becomes slower, harder, and more expensive as the business scales.
Market Reachability
We reconcile the market sizing in the deck with the volume implied in the model. The question is not whether the market is large. It is whether this company can efficiently reach and convert its real buyers at scale with the resources the raise actually provides.
Competitive Position
We assess whether the differentiation is structural or circumstantial. First mover advantage and brand are not moats at Seed or Series A. We look for evidence of genuine defensibility: switching costs, proprietary data, network effects, integration depth, that holds when a well-funded competitor decides this market is worth entering.
Capital Efficiency
We calculate the burn multiple and stress-test the deployment plan against realistic milestones. The question is not whether the raise is sufficient. It is whether each pound of capital deployed creates durable progress toward the inflection point the next round depends on.
Execution Realism
We stress-test the core assumptions in the model: hiring ramps, CAC, churn, pricing, sales cycles, conversion rates, against the company's own historical data and real-world benchmarks. The question is not whether the spreadsheet balances. It is whether a real team, in a real market, can plausibly deliver these inputs without everything going right simultaneously.
The most expensive deal risks are rarely the obvious ones.
The diligence was done.
The team was assessed.
The market was reviewed.
The financials were checked.
But there is another layer, one that is structurally harder to test properly when multiple live deals are moving at once: whether the commercial logic of the business actually holds up under pressure.
That is where businesses that look investable quietly break.
CB Insights reviewed 431 VC-backed companies that shut down since 2023. Running out of capital was the final event in 70% of cases. But the underlying causes were almost always commercial: poor product-market fit, wrong market timing, unsustainable unit economics.
The business did not fail because the cash disappeared.
The cash disappeared because the business did not hold up.
That is the layer we test.
Case Studies + Client Reviews
Investor dodged collapsing Series A
Marketplace with strong GMV growth.
We found 68% of revenue from 3 customers, all on pilot pricing. Real CAC was £1,400 (founder claimed £600). Sustainable LTV/CAC was 0.9:1. Client passed. Company down-rounded Series B six months later.
Founder redesigned pricing, raised seed
B2B software with traction but no investor interest. Pricing was 60% below market, targeting wrong segment (enterprise features, SMB budget). We redesigned for mid-market with 3x price increase. ARR jumped 140% in 4 months. Raised £800k seed two months later.
Board stopped zombie investment
Fintech burning $90k/month with flat revenue. Sales cycles were 11 months for £8k ACV deals. Model required 5x scale to hit breakeven. Fundamentally broken. Board stopped funding. Saved $2M+ in follow-on capital.
Case Studies
Have a question?
Contact us today.
Meet The Founder
I'm Kamille, founder of The X Partnership
I actually got into this business by accident. Let me explain:
I own a luxury real estate company, and many of my clients were running large businesses.
One day, a client was venting about a problem in his company, so I suggested a solution. Long story short, that conversation went from 15 minutes to 3 hours.
Then it snowballed..
My real estate clients kept pulling me into strategic conversations. Then they started asking me to consult for their businesses and referring me to their friends.
Which led me to working with Series A/B/C companies and Private Equity portfolios. I'd spot flaws, risks and constraints and fix them by creating a path forward before they destroyed value.
Then I realised:
VCs were investing in these same companies, without seeing the flaws I was fixing 12 months later. What if they could spot these problems before writing the check?
Founders were burning through runway on broken models.
Boards couldn't tell if their portfolio was failing because of execution or a fundamental flaw.
That's why I built The X Partnership.
Same skill, but at three different stages: before the investment (for VCs), during the scale-up (for founders), and when things aren't working (for boards).