Sample projects
Middle market private equity buyout fund focused on cleantech
Project scope: The host fund had started fundraising for a middle-market (approx. $250-300 million) private equity fund that was focused on investing in companies that were developing clean tech products. The target companies for the fund were: revenue and EBITDA positive, had an existing management team and focused on growing their footprint. The fund asked their student team to conduct the following analysis:
- Evaluate and identify the LP investment market for potential investors into a cleantech PE fund (institutional, high net worth, family office and endowment/foundations)
- Provide a competitive landscape and points of differentiation for their fund against other funds that were currently investing in clean tech
- Highlight and differentiate the various sub-sectors within the clean tech market from the following perspectives: market size, growth, geographic penetration, competitive dynamics and investment potential and
- Identify potential target cleantech investments within each sub-sector including those that had received private equity and venture capital investments. Students had to also develop a set of analyses for valuations for these investments and the key PE/VC competitive players that been active in those sub-sectors
Early stage A/B round venture capital fund considering investments in generative AI
Project scope: The host fund was a very notable and well established VC firm with offices in both Cambridge and San Francisco that provided early-stage venture capital funding to A/B round companies across a multitude of sectors including: enterprise, consumer and healthcare. The host fund was founded by a group of partners who had spun off from some leading VC firms like NEA and had had numerous investment realizations in companies like: SpaceX, Twilio and Box. The student team was asked to evaluate the GenAI market from two perspectives: the current state and the future state. In the future state, the student team was asked to evaluate how Generative AI could disrupt various domestic and international markets. In conducting their evaluation, the student team analyzed the following:
- The competition from existing GP or VC fund investors currently involved in GenAI
- New markets that could potentially be disrupted by GenAI that had not yet experienced disruption from the technology
- The market size and investment potential for those new markets and finally
- Potential target or acquisition companies that could be or were involved in the disruption of those markets
Any further questions about the these projects or any other projects should be directed to Luis Barros at lbarros@mit.edu