What is Fundraising Intelligence?
Fundraising intelligence is the practice of matching a founder to investors on measured behaviour rather than stated preference. Its purpose is efficiency: getting capital and companies to find each other with less wasted motion on both sides. For a founder raising a first round, that means a short list they can act on this week, instead of six weeks spent finding out who was never going to answer.
CherryPitch created this category and gave it its name.
Fundraising is a matching problem
There are no shortage of capital and no shortage of companies worth funding. What is scarce is the connection between one specific company and the handful of investors who would genuinely back it.
That connection gets made today by warm introduction, by who happens to be in the room, and by founders emailing lists they assembled from a search engine. A round costs a founder somewhere between 400 and 500 hours. Most of those hours go to investors who were never going to say yes, for reasons the founder had no way to see in advance.
Fundraising intelligence exists to cut that number down. One job: help a founder and the investors who actually fit them find each other sooner.
A match is only as good as what you know about the investor
Ask three sources what a given fund invests in and you can get three answers. The firm's own site describes the fund it wants to be. A large database carries whatever was last submitted to it, which can be a year of drift ago. A regulatory filing is accurate and arrives months after the fact. An AI assistant answers from training data that closed long before the fund's last three cheques.
None of those sources is lying. They are different snapshots, taken at different moments, for different purposes. Stack them together and you get a picture of an investor that is confidently wrong, and a founder acting on it spends weeks finding that out.
Fundraising intelligence treats this as the hard problem, because everything downstream depends on it. CherryPitch keeps its own record for more than 6,000 funds, reconciles the sources against each other, holds what an investor claims separately from what that investor has been observed doing, and updates every day. Where the two disagree, the observed record carries the weight, because behavior predicts behavior. That record also has to capture what an investor cannot say out loud: the reference class they will compare you to, and the ownership equation that caps what they can pay.
Why a short list beats a big database
Ten thousand investor rows hand the problem straight back to the founder. Somebody still has to work out which ones are worth writing to, and that somebody has never done this before and cannot tell an active fund from a dormant one by looking at it.
Curation is only possible on top of a record you trust. Once you know what an investor actually does, and when that was last checked, a short list becomes more useful than a directory of ten thousand, and it can be defended name by name.
Every investor we put in front of a founder carries a reason written for that investor. Specific to them, traceable to a record, and different from the reason under the name above it. A list without reasons is a directory with fewer rows.
When there are few good matches, the list comes back short. Padding it would be a way of dodging the claim, and the claim is the product.
Where the pitch deck fits
Reading a deck is how CherryPitch learns what a company is, how far along it is, and what it is asking for. That is the input to matching. The list and the reasoning under each name are what a founder came for.
Lines we hold
Not a number, not a percentage, not a bar, not a star. A visible score becomes a target, and a founder optimising for the number has stopped thinking about the investor.
Excellent, Good, Moderate. A label sitting on top of a curated list is a hedge, and a list that is right does not need one.
Every sentence attached to an investor traces back to a record. Where we do not know something, we say so instead of filling the space.
Who it is for
Fundraising intelligence is worth most to a founder raising a first institutional round with no network in venture. You have a company that deserves funding and a list of investors assembled from a Google search, a podcast, and a friend who raised two years ago in a different sector.
It is worth least to someone who already has the right partner's phone number, and worth nothing to someone still deciding whether to start a company.
Common questions
Is fundraising intelligence the same as an investor database?
A database sells reach: every investor, searchable, yours to filter. Fundraising intelligence sells a short list built for one company, with a written reason under each name and a maintained record behind each reason. A database is raw material for it.
How current does investor data need to be?
Current enough that a founder is not writing to a fund whose focus moved last quarter. CherryPitch updates its investor records every day. Regulatory filings run months behind, and an AI assistant answers from training data that is older still.
Does fundraising intelligence analyse pitch decks?
It reads them, as the way of learning what a company is and what it is asking for. That read is the input to matching. What a founder comes for is the list and the reasoning behind it.