Investor pipeline: run your fundraise like a sales funnel

Every two months, Italian Angels for Growth looks at about 100 startups. A quarter make it to screening. Three reach the members’ meeting, where founders pitch to the angels in the room, and two get an investment. The Milan group, which has more than 300 members, publishes that funnel on its own website.

That’s a pipeline. Plenty of founders raising money have only an inbox and a vague sense of who’s warm. Let’s fix that. Here’s the version we’d set up for a seed round: seven stages of an investor pipeline with a clear trigger for each, eight columns, a napkin-sized fit score, a Monday routine, and a plan for the no’s. If this is your first raise, the beginner’s map from zero to a first round is a better place to start.

Why does a funding round behave like a sales funnel?

Because both sides filter, and IAG isn’t unusually picky. Paul Gompers and three co-authors asked 885 VCs how they choose deals (Journal of Financial Economics, 2020). The average firm looked at about 100 companies for each one it backed, met 28 management teams, discussed 10 at a partners’ meeting and took roughly five into due diligence, the investor’s checks on your numbers, contracts and team. That was 2015-16. Read the shape, not today’s odds.

Now flip it around. DocSend followed 175 seed-stage startups through their 2019 raises. The ones that closed had contacted 77 investors on average and held 40 meetings. The founders who failed contacted nearly as many, 70, but got 15 meetings. Roughly one meeting per two investors contacted, against one in five (our arithmetic). The gap was in the middle of the funnel.

It’s slow, too. In High Alpha’s SaaS Benchmarks data, published in February 2026, 47% of founders spent four to six months actively raising, and half met between 11 and 50 investors. Dozens of names, seven stages, half a year: you won’t hold that in your head.

Fundraising pipeline stages, and when an investor moves on

Seven stages are enough for a seed round. The rule: an investor moves to the next column only when something has happened that you could show your co-founder. A call that ‘went well’ doesn’t count.

Stage	What it means	Moves on when
1. Target list	Researched and scored, not contacted yet	You’ve asked for an intro or sent a cold email
2. Intro requested	Someone has agreed to introduce you, or your email is out	The investor replies and a first call is booked
3. First call	A first conversation with a partner, an associate or the angel	They ask for something specific: the financial model, a second meeting, a customer to call
4. Follow-up or partner meeting	Materials sent, second meetings, the full partnership or the angel club hears the pitch	They start formal checks or ask for the data room
5. Due diligence	They verify the team, numbers, contracts, IP and references	A written term sheet arrives
6. Term sheet	The lead investor puts the price and key terms on paper	Final documents are signed and the money is wired
7. Closed or passed	Money received, or a clear no	Passed: the reason is logged and a reconnect date is set

Watch stage 6. A term sheet, the short document with the price and main terms, isn’t money: in the 2020 survey, firms offered 1.7 term sheets for every deal they closed. Paul Graham, who co-founded Y Combinator, tells founders to treat investors as saying no ’till they unequivocally say yes, in the form of a definite offer with no contingencies’. Until the money arrives, the row stays put.

What to track in a fundraising CRM

A fundraising CRM is a list of investors with a status and a history. At seed, a plain investor tracking spreadsheet will do, in Google Sheets or Excel or whatever your co-founder already has open. One rule: every row answers the same eight questions.

• Fund or angel. For a fund, the partner who’d champion you inside it. For an angel, the club they invest through.
• Stage and ticket. Pre-seed, seed or Series A, and how much? Italian Angels for Growth deals run from €0.2 to €1.5 million, with at least €10,000 per member.
• Thesis fit, checked against what they’ve funded lately, not against their homepage.
• Lead or follow? Do they set terms, or wait for someone who does? A lead investor negotiates the price and usually takes the biggest slice.
• Warm path: who can introduce you, and how well they really know this investor. One coffee, or ten years on a board?
• Last touch, with date and channel.
• Next step and date. One action, one day: ‘send the model by Thursday’, never ‘follow up’.
• Notes: questions, objections, other names they mention.

Don’t skimp on the warm path. In the 2020 survey only 10% of VC deals came inbound from company management; professional networks brought in 31%, other investors 20% and portfolio companies 8%. No path? Then write a cold email to investors that gets read.

Angels need one more detail. In IBAN’s survey of Italian angels (386 respondents), reported by Forbes Italia in June 2026, 81% of 2025 deals were syndicated, with six angels per deal on average. Note who leads the group, or you’ll chase six people for one decision.

If you’d rather not build it yourself, our investor CRM template (Excel, English and Italian, €49) comes with the investor list and fit scoring, the stages, follow-up dates, a dashboard and the weekly routine.

A simple fit score

Graham’s rule for ordering investors is ‘breadth-first search, weighted by expected value’, where expected value is ‘how likely an investor is to say yes, multiplied by how good it would be if they did’. A fit score puts a rough number on it.

Give each investor 0, 1 or 2 points on five things. Stage: do they invest at yours now? Ticket: does your round fit their usual cheque? Thesis: have they backed your sector recently? For the intro, a founder they’ve funded is worth 2, a friend of a friend 1, a cold email nothing. Add 2 if they lead rounds your size. Eight to ten is tier A, five to seven tier B. Below five, park them.

Say you’re raising €800,000 for a B2B software company in Bologna. A Milan seed fund that led two B2B rounds last year, reachable through a founder it backed, scores 10. A London growth fund writing €10 million cheques scores 1. However famous, it goes to the bottom.

Where to find names for your investor list in Italy

Start with people who already back Italian startups; the method is in our guide on how to find investors and build your target list.

Angel networks. Italian Angels for Growth (founded 2007) and Club degli Investitori (more than 450 angels, Investor Days every month) both take applications on Dealum, a deal-flow platform. They aren’t quick. IAG allows one to two months from scouting to its members’ meeting, then three to four more from due diligence to the investment. More names in our guide to business angels in Italy.

CDP Venture Capital. The state-backed manager runs €4.9 billion across 15 direct and indirect funds and takes pitches on its own platform. Its 20 vertical accelerators invest €70,000 to €200,000 at pre-seed; you apply on each accelerator’s site, not CDP’s. Here’s how CDP Venture Capital funds startups.

Italian VCs. Growth Capital and Italian Tech Alliance counted 354 active investors in Italian startups in 2025, a peak, with international participation at 46% (24% in 2020), so foreign funds belong on the list too. Italian Tech Alliance lists 80 investor members on its site, and our guide to venture capital in Italy and who invests has more.

How to run investor meetings in parallel, week by week

A pipeline only works if you open it on a fixed day. Try Monday morning, half an hour: move every investor whose exit criterion was met, add new names, re-score anyone whose situation changed and write the week’s next steps, each with a date.

Midweek is for meetings. Follow up within 24 hours with exactly what you promised: the model, a customer contact, the answer you didn’t have in the room. Our guide to sending your pitch deck to investors covers the email itself. Friday: three lines to your co-founders on what moved and what’s stuck.

Timing matters as much as the routine. ‘You should always talk to investors in parallel rather than serially,’ Graham wrote in 2013. He also saw that ‘the biggest factor in most investors’ opinions of you is the opinion of other investors.’ One fund’s interest gets the next one moving.

There’s a contractual reason too. Carta lists the no-shop among the term sheet clauses that bind you from signature: for a defined window, you agree not to ‘solicit or negotiate competing offers from other investors’. Sign the first one while the rest are at stage 2 and you’ve parked them for that window.

That means the deck, the model and the data room are finished before the first call, not in week three. Write to the slow ones first. An angel club that meets monthly or a fund with a formal committee gets your email in week one. Then pack the first meetings into three or four weeks. Closing still takes its time: 83 days for the average VC deal in that 2020 survey. You can’t compress the finish. You can line up the starts.

What should you do when an investor says no?

Thank them. Then ask a single question, something like ‘what would you need to see to look again?’, and write the answer down word for word. The row goes to ‘passed’, with a date to get back in touch: your next milestone, or six months from now.

And keep writing to them. Graham calls investors who reject you ‘some of your warmest leads for future fundraising’. A short monthly email keeps that door open: copy our investor update template with a full example.

Then see where the no’s pile up. DocSend co-founder Russ Heddleston put it plainly in 2021: after 30 real investor meetings that all end in no, ‘you probably shouldn’t contact another 30’. Fix the pitch or the product first. No’s after first calls point at the story; after due diligence, at the numbers or the paperwork.

Checklist: set up your investor pipeline this week

1. Create the sheet: the seven stages in a status column, the eight fields beside it.
2. Fill it from angel networks, CDP’s accelerators, Italian and foreign VCs and your own contacts.
3. Give every name its score out of 10, then sort so tier A sits on top.
4. Find the warm path for every tier A investor and ask for those intros this week.
5. Ready the deck, model and data room, then book first meetings inside three or four weeks.
6. Every Monday, move rows only on facts and give each live investor a dated next step.
7. Log every no with its reason and add the investor to your update list.

This article is general information, not legal or investment advice. Have a lawyer read any term sheet, no-shop clause included, before you sign it.