Sizing a market honestly at Pre-Seed
Our market slide has three numbers and three disclaimers. Here’s the method, and why we’d rather under-claim than defend a fantasy.
Every Pre-Seed deck has a TAM slide, and most of them are fan fiction with a footnote. We publish ours with the assumptions on the face of it, because our product is credibility infrastructure — a company selling honest records should not open with a dishonest number.
A market slide you have to walk back costs more than the round it helped raise.
Three numbers, labelled
$47B is the AI-agent software market projected for 2030 — an over-inclusive proxy, and we say so: Subchain is one infrastructure layer within that pool, not the pool.
$4.7–9.4B is the slice we actually contest: inter-organisational agent transacting, taken as an assumption-driven band of 10–20% of the proxy. The percentage is an assumption. It is written on the slide as one.
$95–470M is an early-mover capture scenario — 2–5% of the slice, five years out. It is labelled "scenario, not a projection" because that is what it is.
Why bother
Under-claiming is a filter. Investors who need the fantasy number were going to churn at diligence anyway; the ones who stay have already accepted the honest frame, which is the same frame our customers’ counsel will apply to every claim in our security note.
Separate proven from inferred. It is our third operating principle, and it applies to our own fundraising before it applies to anyone’s terms.
More field notes
Why the gate lives inside the protocol
Approval workflows bolted beside an agent system are decoration. Authority only means something when the protocol cannot proceed without it.
The Subchain team
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