Fundraising Intelligence Research
The Q2 Report: What Predicts a Meeting, and What Comes After
Two things set founders apart before they hit send: whether the deck was Ready, and whether the list was the right one. Ready decks got 30% response versus 7% for unfinished ones, a curated list more than doubled replies, and warm intros helped early but gave no edge once a founder was in the room.
Scope: the 108 founders who ran tracked outreach through CherryPitch this quarter and reported outcomes. This is the outreach cohort, not the full platform or every deck analyzed, so counts are not comparable to prior reports.
CherryPitch analyzed 1,336 investor outreaches from 108 founders across Q2 2026. Here is what separated the founders who broke through from the ones who got silence.
A founder sends forty investor emails, hears back from fifteen, books eight calls, and moves into real conversations. Another founder sends the same forty and hears back from four. The gap between them was set before either one hit send, and it came down to two things CherryPitch measures: whether the deck was ready, and whether the list was the right one.
This report looks at a specific cohort: the 108 founders who actively ran tracked outreach through CherryPitch during the quarter and reported what came back. It is not the full platform and not every deck we analyzed. It is the subset of founders who reached the outreach stage, which is where response, meeting, and funding data actually exists.
We followed every outreach through the full funnel, response, meeting, and progress toward a round, tagging each one by readiness, investor source, intro type, investor type, stage, and sector. Across 1,336 outreaches from those 108 founders, 22 percent got a reply and about half of those replies became meetings. By the end of the quarter, 10 of the 108 founders had reported progress toward a round, roughly one in eleven. Replies came fast when they came, a median near four days.
Ready, Almost Ready, Not Yet
Every pitch deck sends signals to an investor: the stage it implies, the market it claims, the risk it carries. Fundraising intelligence reads those signals the way an investor would and sorts a deck into one of three states. Not Yet means the story and signals are still unsettled. Almost Ready means the core is there with gaps that still cost the founder. Ready means the deck communicates clearly enough that an investor can judge it on its merits.
Readiness measures one thing: whether the deck is legible to the people it is meant for. That matters for a practical reason. Until a deck is clear, no one can tell which investors actually fit it, and that includes the founder. A muddled deck could plausibly suit a dozen different theses, so any attempt to target investors turns into guesswork. Sending early risks more than a weak first impression. It means pitching before anyone, a human or a model, can point the founder at the investors who would genuinely fit.
So the sequence the data rewards is straightforward. Get the deck to Ready. Let a clear deck reveal which investors it fits. Then reach out. The findings below show what happens when founders follow that order, and what happens when they skip it.
Readiness predicts every step of the funnel
Founders who reached out after their deck earned the Ready stamp got a response 30 percent of the time. Founders who reached out while still Not Yet got 7 percent. Almost Ready founders sat at 18 percent, which shows the effect is smooth. Each step toward a finished deck bought a measurable lift.
The pattern holds all the way down. Ready decks booked a meeting on 18 percent of outreaches. Not Yet decks booked one on 1 percent. This is the same signal CherryPitch gives you before you send anything, and it tracked outcomes more tightly than any other variable in the study.
One honest caveat. Founders who get a deck to Ready tend to be further along in other ways too, with a tighter story and more traction behind it, so readiness reflects some of that broader momentum and not deck polish alone. The signal is still the earliest one you can act on, and it is fully in your control before a single email goes out.
The funnel is where readiness compounds
A reply feels good. Real investor conversations shape the next eighteen months. When you follow founders all the way to progress toward a round, the readiness gap stops being a difference and becomes a different sport.
| Readiness at outreach | Outreaches | Responses | Meetings | Founders with progress |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ready | 675 | 200 (30%) | 122 (18%) | 9 |
| Almost Ready | 375 | 67 (18%) | 28 (7%) | 1 |
| Not Yet | 286 | 21 (7%) | 2 (1%) | 0 |
Read the last column. Of the 10 founders who reported progress toward a round, 9 did it while their deck was Ready and none while still Not Yet. Ready founders were the origin of 90 percent of all the momentum in the study. The response advantage for a Ready deck was more than three to one. Deeper in the funnel, the gap only widened.
There is a mechanism underneath this. An investor opening a cold email has no idea whether a deck is ready or who it was built for. They see a document and a reason it reached them. When a clear deck lands with an investor whose thesis actually fits, those two things line up and the response rate climbs. A ready deck also makes the targeting itself more accurate, because a legible deck can be matched to the investors it genuinely suits. Readiness and fit compound: the clearer the deck, the sharper the investor list, and the higher the response.
Who you pitch is the second lever, and it is a big one
Investor type barely moved the numbers. VCs, angel networks, and individual angels all replied at around 22 percent, so choosing a category of investor did almost nothing on its own. Fit did the work.
Outreaches sent to a CherryPitch-curated list got a 28 percent response rate. Outreaches to a founder's self-sourced list got 12 percent. The curated lists more than doubled replies and meetings, 15 percent versus 6 percent. Since progress comes out the bottom of the meeting funnel, more meetings from a fitted list meant more founders moving forward. We cannot know for certain why any single investor says yes, and no one can. What the data shows is a clear shift in probability: a deck pointed at the right investors gets read, answered, and taken to a meeting far more often. Curation is about contacting the investors whose thesis, stage, and check size actually fit your company, which is exactly what a curated list is built to find.
A warm intro gets you in the room and stops mattering there
Warm intros helped early. Among Ready founders, a warm intro lifted response from 24 to 38 percent and meetings from 14 to 24 percent. That is real, and it is the part founders tend to overrate.
Watch what happens at the end of the funnel. Among Ready founders who got a meeting, the share that advanced toward a round was 7.7 percent after a warm intro and 7.0 percent after a cold one, effectively the same. Once a founder was in the room, the introduction that got them there had no bearing on whether they moved forward. The deck did. A warm intro widens the top of your funnel. Readiness decides the bottom.
Personalization adds a smaller, real lift
Among founders at Ready or Almost Ready, personalized outreach got 30 percent replies against 16 percent for generic sends. Worth the extra minutes, and worth less than getting the deck to Ready and the list to fit first.
Finish first, then target, then reach out
Three moves come out of the data. Finish the deck before you start, because a Ready deck outperformed an unfinished one at every step and by the widest margin at the end of the funnel. Pitch a curated, well-fit list rather than the biggest list you can assemble, because fit more than doubled replies and meetings. Use your warm intros to widen the top of the funnel, and lean on the deck to carry the bottom, since warmth stopped predicting progress the moment the meeting started.
The order is not arbitrary. A ready deck is what makes accurate targeting possible in the first place, so finishing it comes first, and the right investor list follows from it. Skip that step and the list you build, however long, is aimed at investors your deck cannot clearly speak to yet.
The two levers CherryPitch was built for
The two levers that decided this quarter are the two things CherryPitch was built to give you. It reads your deck the way an investor will and tells you what it signals, so you know when it is ready and what a partner will latch onto. Then it curates the investors whose thesis, stage, and history fit what your deck is actually saying, each match with the reasoning behind it. Get the deck ready. Point it at the right room. Don't pitch everyone. CherryPitch.
What we're studying next
Next quarter we turn to the investor side: how partners respond, pass, and follow up once a founder is in the room. We're building that dataset now. Findings publish in October 2026.
How this data was collected
1,336 outreach actions from the 108 founders who ran tracked outreach through CherryPitch between April 1 and June 30, 2026. This cohort is a subset of platform users, the founders who reached the outreach stage and reported outcomes, and is not comparable to deck-analysis counts from prior reports. Readiness reflects deck status at the time of each outreach. Investor source marks whether the list was CherryPitch-curated or self-sourced. Response and meeting figures are the share of outreach that advanced. Progress toward a round is counted once per founder and attributed to the readiness of the outreach that reached it. Outcomes are self-reported and platform-tracked. Percentages are rounded.