How to Find Investors for Your Startup

Most founders build their investor list backwards. They collect a hundred names from a directory, start emailing, and conclude after six weeks of silence that fundraising is a numbers game they are losing. The list was the problem. Roughly half the funds on it were never able to invest in them.

I have sat on the other side of this. Running a €14M fund and eight board seats, I read a lot of inbound. The pattern was consistent: founders who clearly knew what our fund did got a reply, and the rest went into a pile I never had time to answer honestly.

Start from your round, not from a list

Before you look at a single fund, you need four numbers fixed. Every filter downstream depends on them:

• Round size. How much you are raising in this round, not your lifetime need.
• Stage. Pre-seed, seed, Series A — defined by traction, not by how long you have existed.
• Geography. Where you are incorporated and where you operate.
• Sector. The one a fund's analyst would file you under, not the one you would prefer.

If you cannot state these in one sentence, stop. A list built on a vague round is a list of funds that will politely tell you they are "watching the space."

Read the fund thesis before the fund's portfolio

Every fund has a thesis and it is usually published. It states stage, cheque size, sectors, geography and whether they lead or follow. This is not marketing copy — it is a constraint imposed by their own investors, and no partner can override it because they liked your product.

Where the names actually come from

In rough order of yield:

1. The cap tables of companies one step ahead of you. Same sector, same geography, raised the round you are raising, twelve to twenty-four months ago. Those investors have already proven they will do this deal. This is the single highest-yield source and most founders skip it.
2. Co-investors of funds you already know. Funds invest in syndicates. One warm fund gives you the five it usually invests alongside.
3. Public registers and national ecosystems. In Central Europe, national innovation funds and their co-investment schemes are unglamorous and genuinely active.
4. Accelerator and programme networks. Techstars, Rockstart and similar programmes concentrate stage-appropriate capital in one place — one reason a programme is worth more than its cheque.
5. Angel syndicates and operator angels. For pre-seed, often faster and better-informed than any institutional fund.
6. Databases. Useful for filling gaps. A bad place to start, because they optimise for completeness rather than relevance.

Qualifying a fund in five minutes

Five questions per fund. If any answer is no, remove it — do not "try anyway."

Check	Disqualifies if
Stage	They have not led your stage in the last 18 months
Cheque size	Your round is below their minimum or above their maximum
Geography	You are outside their mandate
Sector	No comparable company in the portfolio and no stated interest
Conflict	They already hold a direct competitor

Then add one more, which is not a filter but a routing decision: do they lead or follow? A round with no lead and eight followers does not close. Identify your lead candidates explicitly and treat them as a separate, smaller, better-researched list.

How long your list should be

Work backwards from conversion, not from ambition. Realistic European early-stage numbers for a decent but not hot company: a cold list converts to first meetings in the low single digits of percent; a warm introduction converts far better. From first meetings, expect a minority to reach a second meeting, and a small fraction of those to produce a term sheet.

Which means a qualified list of 40–60 funds, worked properly, is a real round. A list of 300 is a signal that no qualification happened. I built a calculator for this so you can put your own response rates in rather than trusting mine.

The order you contact them in

Never all at once, and never best-first. Sequence in three waves:

• Wave 1 — calibration. Eight to ten funds you would be content but not thrilled to have. Their questions tell you where your story leaks. Fix it before it costs you a fund you actually wanted.
• Wave 2 — targets. Your genuine lead candidates, approached once the deck survives Wave 1.
• Wave 3 — momentum. Followers, contacted once you have a lead or strong lead interest, so you are offering participation rather than asking for rescue.

Running the process in waves is the difference between learning from rejections and simply collecting them.

What kills lists

• Optimising for fund brand. The partner matters more than the logo. A junior associate at a famous fund is worth less to you than a committed partner at an unknown one.
• Ignoring fund vintage. A fund in its final year is mostly reserving for follow-ons. Publicly announced new funds are actively deploying.
• Treating the list as static. It is a pipeline. Log every response and cut what does not move.
• Skipping the warm path. Before you cold-email, check whether a founder in their portfolio will introduce you. Portfolio-founder introductions are the most credible signal a fund receives.

Investor targeting is unglamorous work that pays for itself several times over. Two focused days building a qualified list will save you the two months most founders spend discovering, one polite rejection at a time, that they were talking to the wrong funds.