如何在筹资过程中使用 AI

Startup founders need to know how to get resources.

You can hire the best people on the planet for almost every other skill—marketing, engineering, and sales—but founders ultimately need to keep the company alive.

Right now, it’s a pretty manual process. The internet certainly sped things up, but it still means manual searches, creating hundreds of outreach emails, and assembling pitch decks yourself.

The thing is, this won’t ever change. You’ll still need to research, pick the best investors to reach out to, and pitch.

The human element of fundraising will always be there. However, new AI tools can speed up the non-human elements. It’s possible to use AI to let you focus less time on research and more time on pitching. Better yet, you can get time back to focus back on the company you started.

Instead of looking at AI as a replacement, we look at AI as an augmentation for your core competencies. An emerging category called AI agents has gotten really, really good at this. They work within existing workflows and apps, so you don’t need to hack together a bunch of API calls and integrations yourself. 

Today, we’ll go over a few ways you can leverage AI in your fundraising journey.

How AI can help you at each stage

Segmentation and research

You probably already know that not all VCs (or checks) are created equal. For your market, there are going to be better VC firms to approach. They might have experience, connections, or check sizes in-line with your company’s maturity and sector.

Finding those companies takes a lot of research. You might get lucky and know someone, or listen to a podcast and learn about a firm, but let’s face it: most of it is research. 

Your workflow might look like this:

1. Define your market segment, investment stage, check size, current valuation and cap table. 

2. Use a tool like Crunchbase to start finding investors that fit those criteria.

3. Use a tool like LinkedIn to find specific contacts and fill in the gaps from your Crunchbase research. 

4. Assemble them in a giant spreadsheet or document you share with your founders, and get ready to reach out.

The smart way to do this (with AI) is to use automations. Just as smart is to be process-driven. Finalize the process we just outlined, then instruct a tool like Bardeen. It will take over and start gathering the information for you.

Collaboration is key here, too. Bardeen lets you share automations, but a tool like Dropbox lets you easily share the end result with your founding team. No one is left in the dark.

Outreach and communication

Once you find a qualified candidate, it’s time to start the conversation. 

This could be on any avenue - email, LinkedIn DMs, contact form on their website. 

I know what you’re thinking - and no, you do NOT want to send 1000 messages on LinkedIn to all VCs that fit your criteria. That’s a great way to check a box that says “reach out to VCs”, but a terrible way to build a relationship.

Your message should be personalized to each contact. If you put them on your list, it had to be for a great reason. Maybe their previous investments align strategically with your industry. It could also be their vision and mission statement is right up your alley.

That’s all incredible context that gets lost if you mass-message with a generic template. And that’s where AI can help you. Give it the context, and it can draft a great v1 intro that lets you iterate.

Once you’ve got the message right, you can automate sending and engagement too. You aren’t automating the relationship, but the steps to get you to a call, or an intro.

If this sounds a lot like what a salesperson does, you’re right. Bardeen has a great guide on automating everything I just described.

Pitch preparation

Congratulations, you got the meeting. Now, it’s time to prepare. And…you might notice a theme here. 

Develop a process, automate the robotic parts (like typing and scraping), focus your time on the human and creative ones. Let’s be honest, you don’t have 8 hours a day to spend preparing for a pitch. 

Your pitch deck might not change throughout the process, but before each meeting, you should be doing final research. VCs will appreciate that you’re treating this as a strategic partnership, and that you’ve done your research. Maybe that research is scraping posts from the VCs to find their latest opinions. Maybe it’s that one burning question you have about their investment history. 

Whatever it is, it can be automated.

Don’t forget what happens during and after the meeting, too! Offload your note taking to a team member or an AI notetaker so you can focus on the conversation. After, condense your thoughts into a follow-up message thanking them for their time.

This is a well-documented part of the pitch process, and Bardeen has a great guide on automating it.

Don’t treat the pitch as a black box, though. 

When you send your deck to VCs, you can get valuable information if you use the right tools. DocSend, in particular, lets you see which VCs are opening, downloading, and sharing the deck, giving you insight into who is interested. You also get to see where they’re spending their time on the deck, down to the slide.

Automations and data insights can make your pitches much, much easier.

投资者关系

Well-done, you’ve secured a funding round and have investors waiting for updates.

Assembling drafts and aggregating data will be your number one priority. 

Some key considerations:

1. Format. Keep this consistent across your updates.

2. Cadence. Monthly, quarterly, or annual? Work with your team and investors on what’s best, and commit to it.

3. Content. Metrics in particular. Highlight them, and make them easy to understand. Add key wins, your outlook, and any new hires you want to highlight.

Assembling this draft using a template is easy with AI, especially if you keep your metrics in a source that a tool like Bardeen can pull from.

And remember those neat features from DocSend I mentioned in the last section? They work great for investor updates, too. If you notice everyone’s reading the “Highlights” section, that’s great data to help you see what they find valuable.

结论

In case it isn’t clear, AI will never replace the human part of fundraising. All the automations and tools we mentioned here are meant to save you time on the tedious stuff. 

Most founders know this and are starting to re-tool their workflows around AI. They’ll be the ones ahead when they’re fundraising and going into the next pitch.

The good news? There are so many tools (like Bardeen and DocSend) that can help you with this. Click on the links to learn more.