seed

Uses Metal to Drive Meeting Strategy

hummingbirds

“Prior to investor meetings, we use Metal to look up investors and understand their prior investing patterns. This allows us to fully understand a given investor’s focus prior to the call, enabling us to build the conversation in the right direction.”

Charise Flynn

Founder/CEO

www.hummingbirds.com

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Overview

The Challenge

Investor Intelligence Via Metal

Impact on the Fundraising Process

Executive Summary

Hummingbirds is building a business around hyperlocal creators. For creators and influencers, Hummingbirds provides a way to identify and join campaigns that are of interest. For brands, the Company offers a way to market to a local audience through local creators.

The Challenge

What founders struggle with before Metal

The creator economy is growing rapidly and is capturing the attention of venture investors. Hummingbirds is building the underlying infrastructure to bring efficiency and connectivity to this growing segment.

Owing to their unique positioning in a rapidly growing space, Hummingbirds have garnered significant interest from investors (even when they aren’t raising capital). However, in the absence of the right intelligence on these investors, it is difficult to “build” these discussions in the right direction.

Investor Intelligence Via Metal

How Metal surfaces the right investors

Prior to investor meetings, Charise, the founder of Hummingbirds, uses the Metal platform to develop a quick overview of their prior investing inclinations.

Domain

Questions

Why Does It Matter?

Fund Size & Lifecycle

When did the investor last raise a fund? What was the fund size? How much of the fund is still remaining?

Helps understand the quantum of dry powder that the investor may have available to deploy.

Investment Activity

Has the investor been deploying capital at an accelerating pace, or have they been slowing down? How many deals have they done in the past 3 months, or the past 12 months?

Provides an indication on the investor’s current risk appetite compared to their historical investment patterns.

Stage, Sector & Geography

What percentage of the investor’s total investments have gone toward a given stage, sector or geography?

Shows a basic fit assessment to confirm if the investor has historically been open to the company's relevant stage, sector and geography.

% Investments Led

Historically, what percentage of investments has the investor led in total, and what percentage have they led specifically at Hummingbird’s stage?

Helps build an understanding on where this specific investor fits into the fundraising journey – are they candidates to lead rounds, or should they be pursued for follow-on investments.

Deal Intelligence

What companies has the investor invested in that are most similar to Hummingbirds?

Helps build intelligence on similar investments that the investor has made, helping Hummingbird to draw parallels and reference companies that the investor already understands.

Recent Deals

In specific sectors or stages, what types of companies has the investor been backing lately?

Provides a perspective on the trends that are most interesting to the investor within a given sector or stage.

Partner Background

What sectors and stages has the specific partner been concentrating on? Are they the best partner at the firm for Hummingbirds, or is there another partner that has historically focused on the creator economy and related sectors?

Helps determine which partner(s) at the firm would be most important to a potential investment decision.

Relevant Portfolio Founders

Of the investor's portfolio founders, who do we already know via our LinkedIn or Gmail connections?

Provides insight on connections that have raised from the investor and can potentially unlocking both, access and insight.

For Charise, using Metal is less about gathering data and information on a given investor, and more about figuring out where to take the conversation. If the investor frequently leads deals, then maybe the strategy for the discussion is different. Similarly, if the investor has invested in similar companies, or perhaps in direct competitors, then this is valuable intelligence that can shape the conversation in many different ways.

Impact on the Fundraising Process

How targeting the right investors changes outcomes

On average, founders end up working with less than 5% of the investors that they speak with.

With Metal, Hummingbirds is able to fully understand the inclinations of a given investor. Building this understanding prior to investor meetings helps the Company fit various investors into their fundraising journey.

The meeting strategy is vastly different for investors that have just raised a new fund and are ramping up their pace of capital deployment (versus ones that are slowing down at the end of a given fund). Equipped with the right intelligence, Hummingbirds is able to bring a nuanced approach to every investor conversation.

Executive Summary

Key takeaways from Hummingbirds' use of Metal

Luminaights used Metal's investor intelligence to transform meeting preparation into a structured, repeatable process. By surfacing the most relevant investor insights before every conversation, the team reduced manual research, improved meeting quality, and entered fundraising discussions with greater confidence.