With our first startup (Airlift), we raised $120m in venture financing over a three-year period. During that time, we firsthand experienced the inefficiencies and pitfalls of raising venture capital.

With Airlift, over a three-year period, we spoke with ~300 unique investors, primarily through warm introductions. About 80% of these investors were not a fit for our stage, sector, geography and check size at the time when we engaged with them.

At Metal, we have seen the same problem repeat itself time and again. Founders speak with large numbers of investors, many of whom are not relevant to their company or round, and then use those conversations to form conclusions about the broader market.

The fundamental problem isn't access to investor data alone. It is turning that data into company-specific intelligence about which investors matter, why they matter, and when.

We see this most clearly at Pre-seed. Founders frequently hear that they need revenue to raise, even though many Pre-seed investors regularly back pre-revenue companies. The disconnect often comes from speaking with investors whose mandate does not match the company or round — and then using those conversations to draw conclusions about the broader market.

Across large data sets, the exact same pattern repeat itself across stages, sectors and geographies.

In 2024, along with a small team of engineers, we set out to replace the guesswork that goes into venture rounds with data and software. Along the way, as we listened to customers, we came across powerful insights that shaped our trajectory.

Learning from early customers

We learned that fundraising remains defined by significant information asymmetry. Experienced founders and investors accumulate context that is rarely captured in software: how to approach specific investors, how to position a company in early conversations, and which relationship pathways are most effective.

We learned that it remains incredibly hard for founders to identify the “most likely” investors for their specific company and round. Traditional venture databases provide valuable foundational data, but filters around sector, stage, geography and check size alone cannot capture the context required to determine which investors are most relevant.

Ultimately, we learned that founders need an intelligence and execution layer that combines data and software to increasingly automate core fundraising workflows — from identifying relevant investors and determining how best to reach them to managing communications throughout and beyond a raise.

The investor memory layer

Across the industry, different investors are pursuing different strategies. Some investors prefer to participate in small seed rounds at modest valuations while others prefer to put in a small check in a large round. Some investors prefer to stick to spaces they understand well while others like to be more adventurous. Historically, this information has reached founders through tribal knowledge and word of mouth.

Our core thesis is that the defining infrastructure for capital formation will be an investor memory layer: a continuously evolving intelligence layer that understands investors deeply enough to power downstream workflows for founders.

Over the past three years, our team has developed a sophisticated investor memory layer that equips the platform with a deep understanding of venture investors. This layer enables precision in downstream workflows, making these far more useful than would have been the case if they were standalone products.

As founders use Metal, the platform develops a richer understanding of both the company and the investors relevant to it. This allows Metal's recommendations and workflows to become increasingly personalized over the course of a raise. Each additional workflow creates new context that strengthens the underlying intelligence layer, allowing the platform to improve as usage grows.

By embedding accumulated investor intelligence directly into fundraising workflows, Metal allows founders to spend less time navigating the mechanics of a raise and more time building their companies. As usage grows, the intelligence underlying these workflows becomes increasingly valuable.

Fundraising is only the first part of the company-investor relationship. Last month, Metal launched Investor Relations, our first product extending the platform beyond an active raise. This represents an important step in our broader ambition: turning software that founders initially adopt while raising capital into infrastructure they continue using throughout the company-investor lifecycle.

Capital formation in private markets

We believe fundraising in private markets is increasingly becoming a data and software problem. As the underlying intelligence improves, more of the administrative work involved in running a round will move from founders to software.

Metal Autopilot is our first step toward that future: using Metal's intelligence layer to automate the operational work surrounding a raise, while founders remain in control of investor relationships and financing decisions.

In the years ahead, we believe the software surrounding private-company capital formation will become increasingly connected. Fundraising, investor relations and ownership infrastructure have historically existed as separate workflows, despite representing different stages of the same underlying relationship between companies and their investors.

As these systems become more intelligent, information created at one stage of the company-investor relationship can play an important role in improving workflows elsewhere in the lifecycle.

Private-market software has historically built powerful systems of record across investor data, ownership and administrative infrastructure. We believe the next major opportunity is to build an intelligence and execution layer on top of that foundation — helping companies determine what to do and increasingly automating the underlying workflows.

Over time, we expect these layers to become increasingly interconnected, with systems of record, market data and proprietary intelligence reinforcing one another.

As a new intelligence and execution layer takes shape in private markets, we will see rapid evolution in how various stakeholders create value in and around the transaction. Metal is quickly becoming a hotbed for placement agents, fundraising consultants, venture studios, COS (Chief of Staff) teams and other stakeholders supporting founders in the raise process.

One particularly interesting trend has been the adoption of our platform by capital market teams at leading VC firms to support portfolio raises. In the near future, the investor memory layer will integrate with custom workflows that capital markets teams can build on their end.

Leading the shift

Metal has already automated major chunks of the raise process with data and software. The era in which founders search for investors via databases, LinkedIn posts and word of mouth is squarely behind us.

Today, Metal ranks relevant venture investors for each company and surfaces the factors driving those recommendations, turning what was historically a manual research process into an increasingly automated workflow. The output delivered in minutes now far exceeds what most teams can build in a spreadsheet over a two-month time horizon.

In the months ahead, Metal is bringing similar automation to workflows involved in landing investor calls. Some of these workflows involve significant complexity, particularly around contextual understanding of founder relationships and outreach strategies that work best in specific scenarios.

With end-to-end automation around discovering, researching and accessing investors, Metal intends to become the default infrastructure for founders raising VC. We believe that workflow automation is most powerful when it delivers outcomes that are significantly ahead of what teams can achieve manually.

Proprietary intelligence is becoming a foundational layer of private-market capital formation. Equipped with the right context via user and investor memory layers, agents will soon execute on round operations much better than human counterparts.

In the years ahead, we have an opportunity to fundamentally change how companies and investors interact across the capital lifecycle. Our ambition at Metal is to lead this transition. If you're building in and around private-markets infrastructure, we would love to hear from you (gul@metal.so).

We are deeply grateful to some of our key early partners that have gone above and beyond to support our journey in impactful ways.

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