There’s all sorts of wisdom about how to find folks to invest in your startup, ranging from the obvious to the slightly stalkerish. Approach investors who’ve supported companies like yours in the past. Go to startup school. Wait until a famous VC is stranded somewhere and give him a lift.
In some ways, the most banal of those ideas may actually be the hardest. After all, the universe of companies like yours (yes, I know it’s a special special snowflake, but we’re talking at least roughly like yours) is likely a large one, and startups are not exactly known for making their investor lists easy to peruse.
So to systematize and simplify the search for backers, our friends at New York-based ChubbyBrain are launching what they’re calling a Funding Recommendation Engine. The FRE slices and dices information from the CB Insights database on the funding history of over 8,000 VCs, angel investors, private equity firms, banks, government grant programs, and family offices. You tell it a bit about yourself and your company, and it tells you the 20 best investors to pitch.
Happily, the FRE is free to the first 200 Xconomy readers who’d like to try it out. Just go to ChubbyBrain’s homepage, enter “xcstartup1” (no quotes) in the invite code box, and click the green “Free! Get Started” button. And when you’re done, do us a favor and come back here and let us know how it works out. Bonne chance!
