How do you prioritise which investors to approach?

Why the order you approach investors matters

Investors talk to each other constantly, especially newer funds hunting for co-investment with established ones. The moment you're in market, word spreads: who you've seen, who passed, how long you've been out. That's why you protect three pieces of information: how long you've been raising, who has rejected you, and how many have rejected you.

The information network cuts both ways, and the upside is dramatic. While I was at Octopus, I watched a founder take our term sheet and turn it into an oversubscribed round from a single email in under 24 hours, because every fund that heard we were in wanted in too. Sequencing exists to engineer that moment: signal lands where it helps you, and never before you're ready.

Build the list before you tier it

The raw list wants to be around 150 names, and a good one takes months of lead time rather than a weekend. Filter hard on stage, sector, geography and fund size. A fund whose model needs $100M+ outcomes writing into your $500k pre-seed helps nobody, and a fund that backed your direct competitor is off the list entirely. Where founders go wrong is stopping at 40 names, or keeping everyone with "ventures" in their name. Both kill you later, one through volume, the other through wasted meetings. From roughly 150 fitting names with warm paths into most of them, you can expect 30 to 40 meetings in the first two weeks of the raise.

Three tiers, honestly assigned

• High priority, 10 to 20 funds. The dream cap table: perfect size, geography, sector and capacity. Be brutal here. A tier-1 name belongs on this list only if there's a live reason to believe they'd do your deal. Putting Sequoia in tier A because it would be nice is how effort evaporates.
• Medium priority, 30 to 40 funds. Credible funds you would happily take money from, without the pull of the first group.
• Low priority, the rest. Acceptable backers if the top tiers pass, and useful long before that, as you'll see below.

Tiers move. An unknown fund whose partner replies in two hours and books the follow-up before hanging up earns promotion. A dream fund that takes nine days per email demotes itself. Re-rank on behaviour every week of the raise.

Map paths from your network, then rank by warmth

Most founders build the list top-down: find the biggest names, then go hunting for a way in. I teach the reverse. Start from your connectors and map which investors they can reach, because a warm path into a medium-priority fund beats a cold application to a dream fund in nearly every case. Before launch you want 1 to 3 warm routes into 70 to 80% of the list, and the shape of those paths should feed the ranking itself. Who makes the intro matters too: a portfolio founder or a respected angel carries more weight than a service provider, and a genuine back-channeler, someone on texting terms with the fund, is worth more than either. If your warm coverage is thin, fix the network before you fix the list, which is a 90-day job I've laid out in how to build an investor network before you raise.

The order of play

Start with 5 to 15 meetings from your low-priority tier. These are paid rehearsals. Record them, watch yourself back, and fix what you see, because the pitch you deliver in meeting twelve is unrecognisable from meeting one, and you only get one first impression with the funds you care about. As a bonus, a low-priority fund that lights up in a practice meeting just promoted itself.

Then launch tight. Your connectors should already be prepped on who gets introduced and when. High-priority funds get a one-week head start, everyone else follows the week after, and the aim is 40+ meetings across the opening two to three weeks. Density is the point. A round that opens with stacked meetings feels like an event to investors. The same round spread over four months feels like a company nobody wanted.

After week three: follow the engagement

Here's the mistake I see most in the middle of raises. A high-priority fund enters due diligence, the follow-up meetings get harder and heavier, and the founder quietly drifts back to booking fresh intro meetings instead, because intros are easy and the deck already exists. It's the classic sales failure of abandoning the difficult buyer for the flattering new prospect. Diligence friction is what progress feels like. Feed the engaged funds your best hours.

Keep insurance running though. I've watched startups go weeks-deep with a single investor, get the no, and find their entire pipeline had gone cold behind them. After the opening blitz, hold a floor of 3 to 5 new meetings a week from your untouched low tier or funds you've discovered since launching.

Prioritise them the way they prioritise you

When I led deals, a founder who clearly hadn't researched our fund was a red flag, because if they were sloppy on us, where else were they sloppy? The reverse also holds: your list should rank investors on whether they're good enough for you. The average investor relationship outlasts the average marriage. So weigh what each fund adds beyond money: sector expertise on the team, how they communicate when things go wrong, whether follow-on money materialises, and what their terms look like at your stage. Fewer than half of founders say their investors turned out to be value-add, so do references like a hiring process. Ask the fund for portfolio intros, then separately message founders from their underperforming companies on LinkedIn. Those conversations tell you the truth.

Gian Seehra Ex-Octopus Ventures, part of deploying $200M as a VC. 3x founder, raised $16M. Has coached 120+ founders who have raised $250M+ collectively.