Your time as a founder or as a founding team has come. You’ve probably bootstrapped, have worked on your pitch deck, and feel ready enough to start pitching your startup to investors. But, how can you start? Do you create an investor list and call them one by one? Are cold emails better? How do you know if you’re not wasting your time and the investors’ with unproductive reach-outs?

Our team struggled with the same and has heard dozens of founders with these concerns... that's why we developed Slidebean Investor Finder, to make your process more efficient. 

Using a tool like Slidebean’s Investor Finder will increase your chances not only of making your fundraising process more efficient but your chances of actually getting funded. It matches your company with the profile of investors that are truly interested in your venture’s industry, and who are also geographically close to you. It also gives you accurate and current data to contact them, which will save you dozens of hours.

How was Investor Finder created?

Slidebean created Investor Finder inspired by its own experience and the work with thousands of startup founders who are in the process of fundraising. These companies mostly come to Caya, our CEO, for office hours, and most of the time, their questions revolve around how to find investors and how to put together a good investor list. 

Our team crawled the contacts and investments of tens of thousands of investors and designed a system that automatically searches and matches startups with investors based on industry, location, and company.

When you subscribe to Investor Finder, you receive an email with accurate investor matches:

Free plan: 5 matches per month including AngelList and LinkedIn profiles so you can explore their portfolios.

Standard plan: 20 investor matches per month with AngelList and LinkedIn profiles so you can explore their portfolios plus email contact information.

Founder’s Edition plan: Investor matches every week plus full access to our pitch deck creation platform, templates and AI design system; office hours with our startup experts, proofreading and design tune-ups ,$5,000 startup credits in AWS, Brex, and many other perks.

The right time to target investors 

Not all companies can (or should) approach venture capital investors since day 1. Before reaching out to investors, you need to make sure you have a business that can scale, therefore, that it has a tech variable/aspect and small human capital requirements. 

Venture capitalists expect the business to increase its value in 10X within five years: which requires exponential growth. 

It's about understanding the kind of business you have in your hands, what it is, and what it's not. 

You also need to be clear on how much money are you raising, and why that particular amount of money. Think carefully about how that money is going to get you to cash flow breakeven or to your next set of fundable milestones. 

Once you understand the type of business you have in your hands and how much do you want to raise, it’s time to consider which criteria are important before knocking on investors’ doors.

What criteria should you consider to increase investor matching?

There are basic criteria that are considered as an advantage when it comes to how to find investors that are right for your startup.

- Industry: Make sure to identify people who invest in your sector. This will indicate that the person has a particular interest or belief in the potential of ideas like yours.

- Profile: Know if the investor has placed money in companies your stage or even if the amount of money they tend to put in resembles your numbers.

- Geographic location: Does your investor like to invest in their own country? State? Continent? Or they have a broader mindset in terms of the location of the projects they like to invest in?

How does investor matching work with our tool

The process of enjoying the benefits of Slidebean’s Investor Finder is fairly simple. Once you provide us with information about your business and the kind of investment you are seeking, our experts will search our database to find the best matches. We have an investor list of over 40,000 contacts! 

Then, our system puts together the investor contacts that will match your business better, based on your industry, investor profile, and location (i.e. all the criteria mentioned above); and sends them to you via email, according to the plan you choose.

Bonus: We’re pitch deck experts, too! Either as separate services or as a part of our Founder’s Edition Plan, we can help you with your pitch deck and financial model to increase even more your chances of success while fundraising.

Investor Finder benefits

You may have extracted them from all the information we’ve provided so far, but, in case it’s needed, here are the main benefits of signing up for our Investor Finder tool:

- Save time: We do all the contact crawling and filtering for you.

- Save money: Don’t pay for separate, expensive access to investor databases online, that you will have to manually crawl. Center your investment with our tool and obtain the contacts you really need.

- Reach out to people that matter to your business: We do the work of investigating the investor’s profile, interests, and location, so you get the ones that will most likely be attracted to your project.

Best of luck with your pitches!

Sign up for Investor Finder