Marketplace investors speak a different language than generalist VCs. They'll want to see your GMV, but what they really care about is your take rate and whether it can expand over time—this signals how much value you're actually capturing from each transaction. Liquidity is the other obsession: can buyers reliably find what they want, and can sellers actually move inventory? If you're pre-liquidity on one side, be ready to explain your "chicken and egg" strategy in detail. Most marketplace-focused funds have seen dozens of pitches where founders wave away the cold-start problem, so showing you've thought hard about sequencing (which side to subsidize, which geography to constrain to, whether to manually curate supply early) will set you apart.

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The investors on this list tend to have strong opinions about defensibility. Network effects sound great in theory, but marketplace VCs know most platforms leak value to one side once they hit scale—sellers go direct, buyers multi-home. They'll probe whether your marketplace creates genuine lock-in: proprietary data, embedded workflows, trust infrastructure, or transaction complexity that makes switching painful. One tactical note: marketplace metrics are notoriously gameable (GMV can be inflated, cohort retention can be sliced favorably), so come prepared with honest unit economics at the transaction level. Funds that specialize here have seen every trick, and credibility matters more than optics.