For investors
For investorsNothing reaches an investor until the case, the valuation, the structure, the documents, and the story each stand on their own. The work you would otherwise spend three meetings doing is already in the file, done properly, and laid out for you to attack.
Not a screen for quality of pitch. A diagnosis against the surface you would check yourself, run by people who have built and priced companies rather than only written about them.
Team, market, product, traction, unit economics, competition, financials, cap table, and legal are each assessed and the gaps named. Red flags are resolved or disclosed before you see the company. Finding them is our job, not a test we set you, and a file that arrives with its problems already on the table is the only kind worth your diligence budget.
The valuation is carried by comparables matched on stage, sector and era, each with a citable source, and anything weaker is marked as directional and does not carry the band. Where the founder’s number failed, it was corrected before the round opened rather than defended into your first meeting.
Instrument, round size, minimum ticket, allocation, and the direct or pooled route are all set before outreach begins. The cap table effect is calculated rather than asserted, and the founder has already seen it and agreed to it, so the terms do not move once you are interested.
The memo, the model, the valuation work and the deck are generated from the same defended case, so they carry the same numbers. If you find a discrepancy it is a mistake rather than a position, and we want to hear about it. Most files you are sent cannot survive that sentence being written down.
The quality of any capital practice is set by what reaches it. Most of this market takes what arrives and dresses it. We built the supply side instead, and it feeds this practice before it feeds anyone else.
21M Labs is an independent technology lab in Denver that we fund and venture-build alongside. Every file it opens carries a written assumption, a kill condition set on day one, and a date to check it against. Most do not survive. The ones that show real retention come to us, already stress-tested by the people who built them, which is a materially better starting point than a cold deck.
BuildIQ came out of the lab as file 001 and is now in private alpha with nine trades modelled end to end and every run reconciled against a human estimator. Revaia is pre-launch working capital infrastructure. We carry the operating risk on both, which is the difference between a firm that advises on venture building and a firm that does it.
Alongside the ventures, we take external mandates through the same seven stages, and we turn most of them away. A company that is taken on can still be sent back to more work rather than out to market. That is the filter you are buying access to.
The compressed opportunity: the thesis, the market, the proof, the team, and the ask. Enough to decide whether to spend more time, and no confidential detail.
An executed non-disclosure agreement opens the full file. Releases are authorised and logged, which protects the company and means the founder knows exactly who holds what.
Investment summary and memo, valuation memo with the comparable set, financial model, market work, terms, use of funds, and the diligence Q&A. Structured in the layout institutional diligence expects: overview, market, product, traction, financials, cap table and legal, team.
Participate directly, or through a vehicle we structure and run when pooling genuinely simplifies the cap table. Allocation, onboarding, subscription and closing are managed rather than handed off.
A practice that leads raises has exactly one asset, which is whether the next file it sends is worth opening. Sending a company that was not ready buys one meeting and costs every future one. That arithmetic is the entire reason to work with us rather than with whoever emailed you this morning.
So the filter is applied before the introduction, not after it. Companies are turned away. A company that is taken on can still be sent back to more work rather than out to market. You will see fewer opportunities from us than you would from a broker, and each one will have already survived the person sending it trying to break it.
We do not take a company to market that we would not back ourselves.
What we have built ourselves→