Fundraising Intelligence Research
The Q3 Report: What Funds Say, and Where Their Checks Actually Go
We compared what 1,854 early-stage funds say they invest in with the 24,802 visible new checks they wrote over the last two years. Every fund in the study made more than 10 visible new checks in that time, so each one has a record large enough to read. More than two funds in five, 43 percent, put at least a third of their new checks outside their own stated stages or sectors. When the record drifts, it drifts in a predictable direction: 88 percent of off-stage checks went to a later stage than the fund lists. Stated focus is written for LPs while a fund raises its capital, and founders read it years later as a description of what the fund backs today. For a founder, that means a list built from what funds say carries a large share of names whose visible investing has moved away from their stage or sector.
Scope: 1,854 of the more than 6,000 funds CherryPitch tracks, those active at pre-seed or seed that made more than 10 visible new checks in the period, their stated focus as published, and every visible new first check each fund made in the 24 months to September 30, 2026.
A founder raising a pre-seed round for a fintech company finds a fund whose website says "pre-seed and seed, fintech and B2B software." It reads like a perfect match, so it goes on the list. What the website does not say is that most of the fund's last ten checks went into seed and Series A rounds, and half of them into AI infrastructure. The email goes out. The reply never comes, and the founder concludes the deck needs work.
The deck may have been fine. The website described the fund at the moment it raised its capital, and the checks describe the fund it has become since. The founder only had the website.
This report measures that gap across 1,854 early-stage funds. For each one we recorded what it says it invests in, then every visible new first check it wrote over the last two years, 24,802 checks in all, and compared the two.
How we measured the gap
Every fund publishes a version of its focus: the stages it backs and the sectors it cares about. We call this the stated focus. It lives on websites, in databases and in pitch materials, and it is what most investor lists are built from.
Stated focus also has a particular first reader. A fund writes its thesis while it raises money, to show its LPs a clear strategy, and often leaves it unchanged once the capital is committed. Founders then read the same page as a description of what the fund will back today. That difference in audiences is where the gap in this report begins.
Every fund also leaves a record: the companies it has actually backed. We counted visible new first checks only, over the 24 months to September 30, 2026, meaning investments that appear in public announcements and the databases we draw on. Follow-on checks were left out, since they reflect decisions made years earlier.
We only included funds with more than 10 visible new checks over the period. A fund with two or three visible checks can swing from no gap to a complete one on a single investment, which says more about the sample than the fund. Above 10 checks, a fund's record is large enough to compare with what it says.
For each fund we measured two gaps.
Stage gap. The share of new checks that went into stages the fund does not list.
Sector gap. The share of new checks that went into sectors the fund does not list. Funds that describe themselves as sector agnostic were left out of this measure, since nothing they do can contradict a promise they never made.
A fund counts as off focus when at least a third of its new checks fall outside its stated stages or its stated sectors. We picked a third deliberately. Many funds set aside part of their capital for opportunistic bets outside their thesis, and their LPs expect it. A third of all new checks sits well above any reasonable opportunistic slice. At that level, the stated focus has stopped describing what the fund does.
The conclusion does not depend on where we drew that line. At a 25 percent threshold, 68% of funds are off focus. At 50 percent, 40% still are.
Share of funds off focus at each cutoff. This report uses a third.
More than two funds in five invest outside their stated focus
Only 22 percent of the 1,854 funds wrote every new check inside their stated stages and sectors. Another 35 percent drifted a little, with some checks outside their focus and the large majority inside it. The remaining 43 percent crossed the line: a third or more of their recent checks went somewhere their published focus does not mention.
Where the 1,854 funds land
For those funds, the drift was rarely marginal. The median off-focus fund placed 63 percent of its new checks, nearly two-thirds, outside its stated focus. At that point a founder reading the fund's website is working from a description of an earlier version of the fund.
Stage and sector drift showed up in similar numbers: 28 percent of funds were off focus on stage and 30 percent on sector, and 15 percent drifted on both.
The 43 percent off focus, by kind of drift. Share of all funds.
The two kinds of drift tend to show up in the same funds, through different checks. A fund that crossed the line on stage usually sat just past it, with a little over a third of its new checks at stages it does not list. The rest of its wider gap came from checks in sectors it does not list, and those were separate investments. When a fund moved to a later stage, it usually stayed inside its stated sectors, and when it moved into a new sector, it usually stayed at its stated stages. A fund that has drifted on stage has usually drifted on sector as well, one check at a time, so a founder who checks only the stage, or only the sector, sees half of the gap.
Stage drift runs one way: later
When a fund's visible checks fell outside its stated stages, they almost always went to a later stage. Funds that list pre-seed were writing seed checks. Funds that list seed were joining Series A rounds. Only 12 percent of off-stage checks went the other way.
Where off-stage checks went
That direction matters most to the founders this series is written for. Rising valuations and larger rounds are one likely reason, pulling early funds toward companies with more evidence behind them while their published focus stays where it was. For a pre-seed founder, that is the direction that matters: a fund listed as investing at pre-seed may now be doing most of its visible investing at seed.
One caution belongs with this finding. Pre-seed rounds are announced less often than seed and Series A rounds, so some pre-seed activity never becomes visible, and that can tilt any record toward later stages. Limiting the study to funds with more than 10 visible checks reduces that effect, since these are funds whose activity is widely reported, and it does not remove it. The direction is clear in the data, and its exact size should be read with the visibility gap in mind.
Every sector label drifts
Among the 85 percent of funds that name specific sectors, 21 percent of new checks went into sectors those funds do not mention. The drift appeared in every sector we looked at, at broadly similar rates.
Where the money went when it left the stated sector was telling. Among specialist funds that do not mention AI, 28 percent of their off-sector checks went into AI companies, more than any other destination. A fund that describes itself as a climate or fintech investor may now be putting a meaningful part of its capital into AI before its published focus has been updated to say so.
What the gap does to a founder's list
Run the filter most founders run. Take every fund that lists pre-seed, then check its record. 38 percent of those funds made more than 10 visible new checks over two years and not one of them at pre-seed. These are active funds with a record large enough to read, and that record points to seed and later.
Funds with 10 or fewer visible checks are not part of this figure. Some of them are near the end of their capital, and some invest without announcing it, and from the outside we cannot tell which. For a founder, the practical step is the same either way: ask whether the fund is making new investments before you pitch.
The same filter also hides funds. 288 funds made visible pre-seed checks over the period without listing pre-seed anywhere in their stated focus. A founder working from stated focus never sees them.
We could not measure replies directly in this study, since outcomes sit with founders and funds do not report them. Our Q2 report measured the closest thing. Outreach to a CherryPitch-curated list drew a 28 percent response against 12 percent for a founder's self-sourced list, and meetings rose from 6 to 15 percent. Q3 points to one reason for that gap. Self-sourced lists are built from stated focus, and stated focus is the part of an investor's profile most likely to be out of date.
What founders should do with this
Three moves come out of the data.
Read the record before you trust the label. Pull a fund's last ten new checks before you put it on your list, and check stage and sector separately, since the two drift through different checks. If most of those checks sit outside the stage or the sector you are raising in, treat the stated focus as history.
Check the stage before the sector. Stage drift runs almost entirely upward, so a pre-seed founder loses the most by trusting stage labels. A fund that lists pre-seed and has written mostly seed checks for two years is a seed fund for your purposes.
Ask about the last three checks in the first meeting. "What were your last three new investments, and what stage were they at?" takes ten seconds to answer and tells you more than the website does.
The record is what CherryPitch reads
Most investor lists are built from what funds say about themselves. CherryPitch matches founders against what funds have actually done: the stages they have funded, where their recent checks went and the check sizes they write. Every match comes with the reasoning behind it, so you can see the record yourself before you send anything. A list built from stated focus inherits every gap in this report, and a list built from the record starts where each fund actually is.
How this data was collected
1,854 of the more than 6,000 funds CherryPitch tracks: those whose stated focus includes pre-seed or seed and that made more than 10 visible new checks in the period. They were drawn from a wider set of 4,560 funds with at least one visible check, 32,688 checks in all; we restricted the study to the more active funds because small records produce unstable gaps. Stated focus was captured from each fund's published materials. The record covers 24,802 visible new first checks made in the 24 months to September 30, 2026, sorted by round stage and primary sector. A check is one fund's first investment in one company. Visible means the investment appears in public announcements or the databases CherryPitch draws on; unannounced rounds, most often at pre-seed, are not captured. Follow-on checks were excluded. Sector-agnostic funds were excluded from the sector gap. A fund is off focus when at least one third of its new checks fall outside its stated stages or stated sectors; results at 25 and 50 percent thresholds are reported alongside. Response and meeting figures cited from the Q2 report come from that report's own cohort of 1,336 outreaches by 108 founders between April and June 2026. Percentages are rounded.