Free tool
How many investors do you need to contact?
Enter your target raise, average cheque, and honest conversion rates. The calculator works the funnel backwards from cheques to first emails, entirely in your browser.
What you want to close this round.
The lead usually writes a bigger one; use the blended average.
Illustrative cold-outreach default. Warm introductions run far higher.
Of investors who reply, how many take a first meeting.
Of first meetings, how many end in a term sheet or committed allocation.
Leave at 1 if every cheque needs its own full process. Set 2 or 3 if you expect a lead to bring follow-on cheques in on the same terms.
Investors to contact
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Your funnel, end to end
| Stage | Needed | Assumption |
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The funnel math, worked backwards
A raise is a pipeline with four conversions stacked on top of each other. Cheques come from committed closes, closes come from first meetings, meetings come from replies, and replies come from the list you contacted. So the honest way to answer "how many investors to contact" is to start at the money and divide backwards:
- Cheques needed = target raise ÷ average cheque
- Closes needed = cheques ÷ cheques per close
- Meetings needed = closes ÷ meeting-to-term-sheet rate
- Replies needed = meetings ÷ reply-to-meeting rate
- Investors to contact = replies ÷ reply rate
Worked example (the defaults above)
A $2,000,000 raise at a $250,000 average cheque needs 8 cheques. At 1 cheque per close, that is 8 committed closes. At a 10% meeting-to-term-sheet rate, 8 closes need 80 first meetings. At a 40% reply-to-meeting rate, 80 meetings need 200 replies. And at a 12% reply rate, 200 replies mean contacting 1,667 investors. Every stage rounds up, because you cannot book 79.5 meetings.
The defaults (12% reply, 40% reply-to-meeting, 10% meeting-to-term-sheet) are illustrative cold-outreach assumptions, not benchmarks. Edit all of them. Small changes compound through the funnel: doubling the reply rate halves the list.
What moves each rate
Warm paths beat cold
The reply rate is the most elastic number on this page. A cold email from a founder the investor has never heard of and an introduction from someone they already trust are different products, and the gap between them is usually the difference between contacting hundreds of investors and contacting dozens. Before writing anyone cold, check who you already know: Ishara surfaces warm paths from your own CRM for every investor, including colleagues connected to them, contacts at the firm's domain, and portfolio companies you already have on record.
Fit quality
Reply rate is also a targeting number. An investor whose cheque size actually contains your ask, whose stage matches, and whose thesis covers your sector replies more often than one picked off a generic list, and the meetings convert better too. This is list construction, not charm. The Ishara investor directory holds 32,822 investors filterable by cheque size, stage, and sector, and only 175 of them are located in MENA today, which is why a founder raising in the region usually ends up running global outreach. The top of your funnel is bigger than it looks; build the list deliberately.
Follow-ups
A single email undercounts your real reply rate. A meaningful share of replies arrive on the second or third touch, so a polite, spaced follow-up sequence raises the rate at zero extra list cost. Ishara email runs sequences that pull a contact out the moment they reply, and its template picker is sorted by the reply rates your own sends actually earn, so the message that works rises to the top.
Then run the list as a pipeline
Whatever number the calculator gives you, it only becomes a raise if every name moves through stages you can see. In Ishara, Find my investors scores the directory against your company and explains each ranking, multi-select sends the shortlist into a staged raise pipeline in one step, and Add to CRM is idempotent, so re-running a search never creates duplicates. Each investor also gets a one-minute prep brief grounded in corpus facts and your own warm paths before the meeting.
Selling to governments instead of raising from investors? The bid pipeline calculator runs the same arithmetic for tenders.
Frequently asked questions
How many investors should I contact when fundraising?
Work backwards from the money. Divide your target raise by your average cheque to get cheques needed, then divide by your meeting-to-term-sheet, reply-to-meeting, and reply rates in turn. With illustrative cold-outreach rates (12% reply, 40% reply-to-meeting, 10% meeting-to-term-sheet), a $2M raise at $250k cheques means contacting about 1,700 investors. Warm introductions and a well-targeted list shrink that number dramatically.
Are the default conversion rates real benchmarks?
No. They are editable illustrative assumptions for cold outreach, and your real rates depend on how warm the path is, how well each investor fits your cheque size and sector, and whether you follow up. Replace them with your own numbers as your raise produces data.
Does the calculator store or send what I type?
No. All of the math runs in your browser on this page. Nothing you enter is stored, transmitted, or logged.
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