INVESTOR MATCHING
Find investors for your startup, with reasons attached
Describe the raise in four inputs: sectors, stages, locations, and cheque. Ishara ranks 32,822 investors and puts the reason next to every name, mines warm intro paths from your own CRM, writes a grounded prep brief per investor, and pushes your picks into a staged raise funnel in one action.
The method
Describe the raise. Read the reasons. Work the funnel.
Most founders find investors for a startup by inheriting someone else's spreadsheet. Ishara replaces the spreadsheet with a query over 32,822 investors, and replaces gut feel with a reason you can read for every name.
1. Describe the raise
Sectors, stages, locations, and the cheque you are raising in. That is the whole input: the shape of your round, not a keyword lottery.
2. Read the ranked reasons
Every investor on the shortlist carries the explicit reasons they are there: the fit between your criteria and their record, stated in words, not hidden in a score.
3. Work the funnel
Multi-select the names you want and push them into a staged raise pipeline in one action. The shortlist becomes a working funnel, not another list.
Warm paths
Four ways your own workspace already knows this investor.
A cold list is a last resort. Before you send anything cold, Ishara joins each shortlisted investor against your own CRM, and only yours, using four rules. If a path exists, it is printed next to the name.
Colleagues in your CRM
People already in your book who work at the investor's firm. The warmest possible route: someone you know sits inside the building.
Co-invest peer graph
Investors in your book who have co-invested alongside the target. An intro from a peer who has shared a cap table with them carries weight.
Records at their domain
Records in your workspace whose email addresses sit at the firm's domain. If you have corresponded with the firm, the path surfaces.
Their portfolio, your book
A company they backed that already lives in your CRM. A founder they funded is often the intro most willing to vouch for another.
Prep briefs
Meeting-ready in a minute, grounded to the letter.
One click on any shortlisted investor produces an AI prep brief built from exactly two ingredients: the corpus facts on that investor's profile, and the warm paths mined from your own workspace. Nothing else. No web guessing, no invented colour, and briefs are cached, so opening one again before the meeting is instant.
- Grounded in corpus facts plus your warm paths, and nothing else
- Cached per investor, so the second open costs nothing
- Reads in about a minute: thesis, record, and how you reach them
Shortlist to funnel
From ranked names to a raise pipeline in one action.
Multi-select any set of results and push them into a staged raise pipeline. Add-to-CRM is idempotent: adding an investor who is already in your book never creates a duplicate, and In-CRM badges on the shortlist show at a glance who you are already tracking. The match itself is a URL, so the exact ranked list, reasons included, is one link away for your co-founder.
- Multi-select a page of investors into a staged raise funnel
- Idempotent Add-to-CRM with In-CRM badges on the shortlist
- A shareable match URL: same criteria, same ranking, same reasons
Why reasons beat scores when you find investors for a startup
Every matching tool can emit a number. The problem with a bare score is that you cannot argue with it: 87 tells you nothing about whether the model understood your round or hallucinated a fit. Ishara ranks with the reason attached, so a wrong reason is visible immediately and a right one doubles as the first line of your outreach. You are not asked to trust the ranking; you are shown it.
The funnel math is the other half. A seed raise routinely means dozens of conversations to reach a handful of term-sheet discussions, which is why the shortlist flows into a staged pipeline instead of ending as a document. The chart above is an illustrative structure, not customer data, but the shape is the honest one: wide at contacted, narrow at signed. The raise pipeline calculator lets you put your own numbers on it, and the founder's view walks the whole method end to end.
One boundary worth stating: warm paths are computed against your own workspace only. Ishara never mines other customers' books to manufacture an intro, and the prep brief never reaches beyond corpus facts and your own graph. The shortlist you get is built from the directory plus what you already know, which is exactly what a good raise runs on.
The fastest test is your own raise. Start free, describe it, and read the reasons on the first ten names.
Frequently asked questions
How does Ishara decide which investors match my startup?
You describe the raise in four inputs: sectors, stages, locations, and the cheque you are raising in. Ishara ranks the 32,822-investor corpus against that description and attaches the explicit reasons to every name on the shortlist, so you can verify the fit instead of trusting a bare score. The result is a URL you can share with your co-founder.
What are warm paths, and whose data do they use?
Warm paths are introduction routes computed with four join rules against your own workspace only: colleagues in your CRM who work at the firm, investors in your book who have co-invested with the target, records at the firm's email domain, and portfolio companies of theirs already in your CRM. Ishara never mines other customers' data to manufacture an intro.
What goes into the AI prep brief?
Exactly two ingredients: the corpus facts on that investor's profile and the warm paths from your own workspace. It reads in about a minute and is cached per investor, so reopening it before the meeting is instant. It never guesses beyond those sources.
What happens when I add shortlisted investors to my CRM?
Multi-select any set of results and push them into a staged raise pipeline in one action. Add-to-CRM is idempotent, so an investor already in your book is never duplicated, and In-CRM badges on the shortlist show who you are already tracking.
Stop working the market blind.
The investors, the tenders, and the signals are in Ishara from day one. You bring the deals.
Free to start · 32,822 investors on day one · Qatar tenders live, more markets on the way