The Investor Shortcut

I've had very real conversations recently with several early-stage founders.

Each of them was looking for the same thing - a broker, a person or a company who could find their investors for them.

I understand why. Raising is stressful. It takes months, it pulls you away from the business, and most of the answers are no. Handing it to someone else feels like a fix.

Here’s what I said to them.

If you can’t sell your venture to investors, you’ll struggle to sell it to customers.

It’s the same skill, with a different audience.

The founder who can explain who pays, why they’d pay now and what it costs to win them is the founder who closes a buyer and a fund. When that story isn’t clear yet, an introduction only gets you into the room sooner. It doesn’t change what happens once you’re in it.

Why this matters more right now

The money hasn’t gone away. It’s just going to fewer places.

Tech.eu’s tracker puts European healthtech at €1.6bn raised in the third quarter of this year, up a fifth on the same quarter last year. But the number of rounds fell 19%, to 89. And one company, Neko Health, took €614m of that on its own.

So investors are writing bigger cheques to fewer companies, and they can afford to be choosy. They’re backing founders who already show they know who their buyer is. A warm introduction still opens the door. It just doesn’t carry much weight once you’re in the room.

What it looks like from the other side of the table

Sitting on the investor side, I see it from the other direction too.

Recently I went through one company’s evidence properly. Every report, every data set, every peer-reviewed paper had been published by the founder.

That usually comes from good intentions, and it’s common at an early stage. But there’s so much hype in health that anyone reviewing a deal looks for proof from someone other than you.

I’ve been the founder in this position too

In 2014, when I was building Healthy Nibbles I had never raised before and was convinced I needed external support to do so. Very quickly I realised that the successful conversations were as a result of my conversations with investors, rather than external introductions.

What did help was getting external support to make sure we were ready, tailored investor readiness from someone who had been on the journey.

So before you look for someone to find your investors, three things are worth doing yourself.

1. Get your story down to one paragraph.

Who the buyer is, what you solve for them, why now, and what it costs you to win one.

Try it on a customer before you try it on an investor. If the customer leans in and asks what happens next, you’re close. If they nod politely and change the subject, the story isn’t finished yet, and that’s useful to know before you’re in front of a fund.

2. Build a short list of the right investors.

Thirty investors who have backed your stage, your sector and your cheque size in the last eighteen months will do more for you than three hundred who haven’t.

For each one, check their recent deals as well as their website. Note who led, who followed, and how much. Look at what each company already had in place when the money arrived - a buyer, a clearance, a channel, a price. That tells you what that investor needs to see before they’ll back you.

Then work out who can introduce you to each one. Often it’s a founder they’ve already backed.

3. Have the data room ready before the first meeting.

Your cap table, management accounts, financial model, customer or pilot contracts, IP, team, governance and any regulatory pathway.

Add at least one piece of evidence you didn’t produce yourself - from a customer, a clinician, or a study you didn’t run or pay for.

When an interested investor asks, you send it the same day. That tells them you know your business, and it saves weeks of back and forth at the point when momentum matters most.

Where Well Purposed fits

This is the work I do with founders through Well Purposed and the VITAL Framework - getting investor ready, researching a shortlist of the investors who genuinely fit, and preparing the data room.

You make the approaches yourself (and you should, because you’re the person they’re backing).

A good introduction still helps. It works best for the founder who already has the story, the shortlist and the data room.

If you’re planning to raise in the next six months, reply and tell me where you’re up to.

With purpose,

Sara