A list of investors is not an asset
Clay is worth billions for joining data sources together. The same logic says your 300-name investor list is close to worthless, and what to do instead.
Clay raised a $100 million Series C at a $3.1 billion valuation, announced in August 2025 and led by CapitalG. In January 2026 an employee tender led by DST Global valued the company at $5 billion.
Clay does not own proprietary data. It joins other people’s data together and lets you act on the result.
Sit with that. The join was worth more than the data.
Why your investor list is worth so little
Every founder raising has a list. Three hundred names, pulled from a database, a newsletter, or a spreadsheet a friend shared.
So does every other founder. The same names, from the same sources, in the same order.
A list is a commodity input. It tells you who exists. It tells you nothing about whether this particular fund will write this particular cheque this particular quarter.
That is the join, and almost nobody does it.
Where the raise leaks
Two numbers from watching founders work their lists
70%
of outreach time goes to funds that are structurally wrong on stage or cheque size.
12%
of a typical 300-name list survives an honest fit filter.
What a real fit score needs
Four things, and only one of them is on the list you downloaded.
Stage is the obvious filter and the one people get wrong. A fund with “seed” on the website that has written nothing below Series A for two years is not a seed fund.
Cheque size is arithmetic. If their typical first cheque is $3 million and you are raising $800,000, you are a rounding error on their model.
Recent activity is the filter nobody applies. A fund at the end of its deployment period is polite and slow. That is not a soft no. It is a hard no, delivered gently.
Thesis overlap is last, not first. It is the one founders lead with, and it is the least predictive of the four.
The join
Four inputs, one score
-
Step 01
Stage, from behaviour
Read the last twelve months of announced deals, not the About page.
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Step 02
Cheque size, from arithmetic
Fund size divided by expected positions gives you a range. Compare it to your round.
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Step 03
Deployment window
A fund that closed recently is buying. A fund four years in is mostly reserving.
-
Step 04
Thesis, last
Only worth checking once the first three pass. It disqualifies less often than founders think.
The prompt
This scores one investor at a time. Run it in a loop over your list.
You are scoring one investor against one company for fit. Be harsh.
A wrong "yes" costs the founder three weeks.
THE COMPANY:
Stage: [SEED / PRE-SEED / SERIES A]
Raising: [AMOUNT]
Sector: [SECTOR]
Geography: [WHERE INCORPORATED, WHERE REVENUE IS]
Traction: [TWO NUMBERS, NO ADJECTIVES]
THE INVESTOR:
[PASTE: fund name, fund size if known, last 10 announced investments with
stage and date, stated focus, and anything you know about their last close]
Score each of the four dimensions from 0 to 3. Show your reasoning in one
line each. Never give a score you cannot justify from the pasted evidence.
1. STAGE FIT: based only on the last 12 months of announced deals.
Ignore what their website says.
2. CHEQUE FIT: is our round size inside a range this fund plausibly writes?
If fund size is unknown, say UNKNOWN and score 0.
3. DEPLOYMENT WINDOW: are they likely actively deploying? Say what evidence
you used. If you have none, say NO EVIDENCE and score 0.
4. THESIS FIT: does the sector and model match what they have actually
backed, not what they claim to like?
Then output:
TOTAL: /12
VERDICT: one of PRIORITY (10-12), WORTH A SHOT (7-9), SKIP (0-6)
THE ONE REASON THEY PASS: one sentence, the most likely reason.
THE INTRO ANGLE: which portfolio company or partner is the shortest path,
based only on the pasted evidence. If none, write COLD.Two rules make the output usable. It must score zero when it has no evidence, and it must name the most likely reason for a pass. A model that flatters your list is worse than no model.
What changes when you do this
The obvious gain is time. The real gain is what happens to your outreach.
When you know why a fund is a match, the first line of the email writes itself. Not a compliment about their portfolio. A specific reason this company belongs in their model.
That is the difference between mail merge and research. Investors can tell in one sentence.
The scoring prompt, plus a sheet to run it over a list, are on the resources page. Free, and there is nothing to sign up for.