PARTNERSHIP
Region
Global Presence
Founded
2006
Portfolio
10,000+ startups funded
Focus
Early-stage startups
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
What techstars founders found were struggling with
Founders spent 100+ hours gathering basic information through word of mouth and manual research. They struggled to answer essential questions:
Missing Investor Intelligence
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?
Missing Investor Intelligence
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.
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
The fundraising operating system for founders
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.
Metal's core capabilities across the Techstars portfolio:
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. 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.
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.
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.
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
Why Techstars made Metal the default platform
Historical data on venture activity shows that about ~70% of all rounds over the past decade came from companies building in the B2B Software segment. In the realm of B2B SaaS, companies should be able to target a broad variety of investment firms (as most investors are open to investing in B2B SaaS).
Within B2B SaaS, however, there may be specific sub-sectors that require or benefit from sector specialisation.
Examples may include enterprise software or productivity software whereby there may be important attributes that are unique to that sub-sector. Therefore, B2B SaaS founders might be best off considering investors that specialise within a given sub-sector.
