In Q2 2025, Techstars officially deprecated their internal fundraising platform, making Metal the default option across the entire portfolio. In the months prior to the transition, a number of Techstars portfolio founders shared feedback around the efficiencies that result from using Metal as an operating system for raising venture rounds.
The Challenge
For more than two years, Techstars experimented with various internal tools to support founders during their raise. They tried every tool on the market, but were still unable to provide founders with a modern, data-driven operating system that provided the intelligence and the precision that founders needed during high-velocity fundraising processes.
(1) Missing Investor Intelligence
Founders spent 100+ hours gathering basic information through word of mouth and manual research. They struggled to answer essential questions:
• What stages does this investor specialize in?
• What valuations do they invest at?
• Which investors are investing in the same direction as a given Company’s business model?
• Which investors have invested in direct competitors?
• What are the “most likely” lead investors for specific types of rounds?
As with most investors, Techstars has a wealth of proprietary data that they use for internal analyses. With the market evolving so quickly, historical data often proves to be of limited value, especially as it relates to early-stage venture rounds.
(2) Relationship Intelligence for Warm Introductions
Founders within the program require access to basic relationship intelligence, such as who within their network has previously raised from a given investor, or who within the Techstars portfolio has recently worked with a given investor.
(3) Need for Repeatable Coaching
Techstars needed a structured and repeatable way to guide founders, particularly those within their cohorts that were raising for the first time.In their experience, first time founders undergo a steep learning curve around round structures and general best practices on fundraising. From the strategic to the tactical, Techstars generally works very closely with founders to help them succeed.
Introducing Metal as the AI-Driven Operating System
Metal brings together investor and relationship intelligence with pipeline management, enabling founders to identify the “most likely” investors and organise the raise in an intelligent operating system. With the in-app agent, founders have a round analyst that can provide deep empirical precision on critical questions, such as round structures and best practices.
By combining industry-wide institutional data with each founder’s unique context, the platform delivers a highly personalised experience for each founder, surfacing the intelligence that founders need.
(1) Investor Discovery, Research & Qualification
With AI-driven search, granular filters and thesis mapping, Metal helps founders discover investors that are the “most likely” partners for a given raise. In addition, with rich insights on investors, founders are able to conduct critical research to prepare well for investor calls.Each investor profile includes data on stage concentration, sector focus, lead behaviour, follow-on patterns, and similar investments. This eliminates guesswork and ensures founders focus on investors that have historically invested in similar investing theses.
(2) Relationship Intelligence
Across the industry, founders generally underestimate the value and the power of their own networks. With Metal’s relationship intelligence capabilities, the platform surfaces information that helps founders identify their most important connections, specifically for introductions with or intelligence around a given set of investors.
(3) Fundraising Pipeline Management
Metal centralizes every investor interaction into a structured, visual pipeline. Founders can track progress from “Identified” to “Seeking Intro”, organising their raise into a structured pipeline that consolidates investor research, relationship intelligence and historical communications in one place.
(4) AI Round Analyst
Metal’s in-app agent, codenamed Richard AI, served as a round analyst, bringing deep empirical precision to everyday questions, such as valuations, investor fit assessments and analysing call transcripts to provide actionable feedback.With the round analyst, founders are able to increasing their “fundraising IQ” and access to empirical insights, bringing stronger confidence throughout the process.
The Techstars Decision
After reviewing feedback across multiple cohorts, the Techstars leadership made a pivotal decision to double down on their core strengths as an accelerator, to deprecate their internal software systems, and to transition the entire portfolio to the Metal platform.
Today, Metal is the recommended fundraising platform across the Techstars global network (that spreads to 10,000+ founders that they have funded over the years).
