Startup Grind’s Investor Program
Being part of a startup community is great! There is lot’s of networking with super interesting founder’s, opportunities to learn about their products, and so much more. While all this is great, the one thing that startup founders crave most is the opportunity to explain to investors why they can convert the laters millions into billions!
At Startup Grind, in addition to the networking with super interesting founders and great learning opportunities, we have been acting as a bridge between startup members in our community and investors from all over the world. The result? 1,819 double opt-in startup-investor introductions for over 500 startups since May 2020.
The Investor Program
Startup Grind’s Investor Program is a matchmaking tool for the startups which are part of our Startup Membership Program (which you can read about in this article) and are actively raising funds.
The process is simple. Startups submit their interest in meeting investors through an investor exposure form where they give us various details about their current raise. Based on this information we match the startups with investors and send a monthly deal flow newsletter to them. The newsletter has loads of information about the startups such as pitch decks, fundraising blurbs, company figures, etc. The investors review the lists and let us know which startups fit their mandates and would like intros with.
The Investors
As of September 2021, we have over 450 investors who are part of our investor program, receiving curated deal flow from from us. This includes VC firms such as General Catalyst, Backstage Capital, Index Ventures, Mouro Capital, CVC’s, Accelerators like Plug and Play, Techstars and Angel/ Family offices. The investors fill out a form giving us their investment criteria based on which we match them with startups and share their details. The investors then review the startups sent to them and choose to speak with the most relevant ones.
Over the last year and a half, 399 unique investors have accepted 1,804 meetings with startups from our investor program. These have been a mix of direct meetings scheduled by SG and warm email introductions which makes for most of them.
“Being an active member of Startup Grind’s investor program has given me the opportunity to meet brilliant entrepreneurs every week ,it has allowed me to discover global innovation across all verticals. I’m looking forward to more meetings, competitions and events facilitated by SG”
— Plug and Play
Success Stories
Providing deal flow to investors and facilitating loads of meetings is great, but what about the results? Let’s hear directly from some of the startups which have recently benefitted from these introductions:
Gorodata
“GORODATA is an AI-powered sales intelligence platform that finds B2B Buying Signals — insightful and useful information to power sales — from an otherwise overwhelming amount of data available online. In the beginning of 2021 we started raising our pre-seed round. Aayush from StartupGrind matched us perfectly with 3 investors from different countries. Two of them invested a total of $205K in the round.”
RoomPriceGenie
“RoomPriceGenie have created a SaaS solution that helps small hotels set their prices with demand and supply, and increase their revenue by 20%. In 2021 we were raising our seed round. Aayush at StartupGrind put us in touch with a number of good investors who were a good fit for us. They really did a good job of matching. Eventually one of them invested in the round, which totaled around $2.2m.”
Adam.ai
“Adam.ai is a B2B SaaS meeting management platform for the modern workplace. We’re introducing an All-in-one experience to manage the entire meeting workflow starting from scheduling, running the meeting, and following up; simultaneously, we connect to the organization existing workflow and systems. Startup Grind team and their amazing investor matching program were able to introduce us to the relevant investors. As a result, we were able to close our first pre-seed round with Atlassian. I want to thank the whole team in Startup Grind for their endless support, with special thanks to Aayush, Naman, and Alex for their outstanding effort throughout the whole accelerate and investor programs.”
These are just a handful of founders who told us about their success stories recently. There are many more such stories of startups raising from investors who they met through our investor program. Some of those are:
Otis AI- Raised 250k from two investors whom they met through the investor matchmaking and are about to raise another $1m from an SG intro.
RealKey- Raised $100k from an investor who met them at the SG Demo Day
Animal ID- Met one of their current investors at our Global Conference. Also received a feature story about their startup on the SG blog.
What else are we doing?
Along with the investor matchmaking program, we also connect startups with investors through dedicated events involving startups in our program and investors. This is primarily in the form of a Quickfire Demo Day and Investor Office Hour’s.
1. Quickfire Demo
The Demo Day is an exclusive, invite-only pitch competition for the 10 most exciting startups taking part in our 2021 Startup Summits and members of our Investor Program. We have now hosted three such events this year, each linked to our quarterly startup summit’s.
The latest edition was held on the 16th of September this year. Ten of the most exciting startups from industries such as SaaS, Cybersecurity, EdTech, HR, etc. presented in front of numerous investors and a panel of judges that consisted of James Swingos, Jennifer Wu and Bryan Offutt.
Otis AI was chosen as the winner by the judges with Havoc Shield and GoCoach placing second and third respectively. You can learn more about these startups and the others which were selected for Demo Day here.
2. Virtual Office Hours
The Virtual Office Hours are events wherein we make facilitate hundreds of meetings between investors and under represented founders in a short span of 1–2 days. We have conducted two such events; The Female Founder Office Hours and The Black Founder Office Hours. Startups with founders from the target group are invited to apply and are matched with hundreds of investors who sign up to participate. Across the two office hours, we have facilitated 527 scheduled meetings and warm intros between the startups and investors.
The purpose of these office hours is to promote the spirit of inclusion through the Startup Grind community and empower the founders from under represented groups. Inspired by the success of these events, we are now hosting another Black Founder Office Hours later this month, bigger and better than last time!
Looking Back
Over the last year and a half, Startup Grind’s Investor program has come a long way from just cold emails to investors gauging their interest in the startups in our community to a full fledged program making hundreds of introductions on a monthly basis, conducting Demo Day’s, hosting office hours and just creating great value for the startups in the SG community! We are excited to do many great things on the program moving forward, and if you are interested to be a part of this as an investor or startup, visit our website to learn more about how you can join.
