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Announcing VC Match: The Obvious Fundraising Tool No One Built – Until Now
The NFX Team ·@NFX
Jul 2019
VC Match

Today we’re launching VCMatchApp.com.

It’s built for Founders to find the right VC faster.

Try it out here.

To uncover your best VC matches, answer 7 questions about your company and founding team, and connect to your network. You’ll then be able to see your top VC matches, including who scores #1. It works because there’s a ton of community-inputted data and complexity in the backend.

We’re sick of living in the dark ages of fundraising. We hope VC Match is the first step in finding a better way.

VC Match is a community-powered tool and is in beta.  Each user has a voice and is a critical part of the product development. Every piece of feedback matters.

Here’s how VC Match works

VC Match helps Founders & VC’s find the right matches.

For Founders – Uncover your best VC matches by answering 7 questions about your company and founding team, and connecting to your network. You’ll then be able to see your top VC matches, including who scores #1.

For VC’s – Easily update your Signal profile to include the sectors you’re most interested in, past investments, professional experience, and education. Every time you make updates, you improve the fundraising experience for yourself and the Founder community. You can also leverage the VC Match community to broadcast what’s right for you, and what’s not.

Here’s how it does it:

1. Unique data. To our knowledge, no one before gathered all the structured data needed to effectively match VC’s and Founders on the 10 criteria that matter. This unique data comes from Signal and includes millions of network relationships between VC’s and Founders, as well as 10,000+ upvotes from Founders and other VC’s about who are the best people to work with (data network effect).

2. Multi-player. The more people use it, the better.  Unlike a Google search or a Match.com search, VC Match is designed to be “multiplayer” where the more people you are connected to on the graph, the better your search results. What that also means is that by connecting with other Founders, you are helping them and they are helping you (direct network effect).

“…by connecting with other Founders, you are helping them, and they are helping you.”

3. Transparency. When a Founder receives their stack-ranked list of VC matches, they can see which criteria are being used in the algorithm. This empowers them to improve their searches, and continuously learn how to go deeper in the matching.

4. Solves problems for VC’s too. VC’s easily update their profiles and every time they do, they improve the fundraising experience for themselves and the Founder community (data network effect). VC’s also can leverage the VC Match community to broadcast what’s right for them, or what’s not. Other than blogs and Twitter (which we don’t think work well for this use case), there hasn’t been a way previously for VC’s to effectively broadcast.

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Why we build software at NFX

As Founders ourselves, we experienced firsthand the many ways that fundraising was medieval and needed better technology. Our startup ecosystem is super-networked, yet fundraising lags by lightyears. We share the frustration of leading Founders and VC’s in calling for a better fundraising experience:

Fundraising experience
Fundraising
Fundraising experience

Now as Founders-turned-investors, we cannot not try to solve this problem. There are many obvious and time-sucking steps in the process for both Founders and VC’s that keep us away from doing the most value-added pieces.

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The other fundraising tools we integrated with VC Match

To date, we’ve built 2 other tools to help the community see what others do not:

1. Signal – the Founder-VC network to help fix fundraising.
2. VC Lists – short lists of the top ranking VC’s who invest in specific sectors and stages.

VC Match and VC Lists are built on top of the growing Signal database and connection graph. They get better the more we all use them.

………..

Use it, share it, & give us feedback

This is truly a community tool, so it’s up to all of us to use it, share it, and tell the NFX Product team how to make it better.

With greater vision, we believe top Founders can take action with greater precision. And have a better outcome.

Great Founders know that fundraising is just part of the journey. And it’s much more meaningful when done alongside your community.

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The NFX Team
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As Founders ourselves, we respect your time. That’s why we built BriefLink, a new software tool that minimizes the upfront time of getting the VC meeting. Simply tell us about your company in 9 easy questions, and you’ll hear from us if it’s a fit.


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