What 16 Investor Interviews Teach Founders About the Decision After the Pitch

Kopa Ventures doubted Daato at first. Benjamin Wochner, an investor at Kopa, described it as a $20 million early-stage fund focused on impact startups in Europe. Daato builds software for ESG reporting and management, and to his team that market looked overcrowded. In his Brighter Future interview, published in January 2025, he explained what changed the fund’s view. “The founders managed to show us why their approach might be the most successful and win over the competition because they were able to outline the problem in the market very precisely.” The doubt was about the market, and the founders answered it with a more exact account of the market. That is a doubt that clarity reversed, and Kopa went on to back Daato.

Some passes no account can reverse. Abe Murray, a general partner at AlleyCorp, described the firm as a pre-seed and seed investor writing $1 million to $3 million cheques, and set out the size of business it can back. “If you’re building a business that caps at $50 million in revenue, that's phenomenal, but it’s not a venture-scale opportunity.” Danny Brown, a partner at the Los Angeles seed fund MaC Venture Capital, gave the arithmetic behind that line. MaC’s initial ownership target of 10 to 15 per cent shrinks as later rounds dilute it. “We aim for a few percent of a billion-dollar company rather than 10% of a hundred million-dollar company.” A well-run company heading for $50 million in revenue fails that sum, and no slide changes the result.

The difference between those two outcomes is where each one sits in the fund’s decision. The archive is most useful read as investors’ own accounts of what happens after the meeting, in the order a fund decides. Fit comes first, then commercial terms, then diligence, then the people who vote.

Sixteen funds describing their own process

The interviews were published between May 2024 and July 2025. Cheque sizes ran from about €100,000 at Rubio Impact Ventures to €10 million at Future Energy Ventures. The sample includes a generalist seed fund in MaC, four food and agriculture specialists in Agronomics, AgFunder, Serra Ventures and Lever VC, an angel syndicate in Green Angel Ventures and a venture studio in Marble, alongside climate and impact funds from pre-seed to growth stage.

That spread makes the archive useful and limits what it can show. Each investor is describing his or her own fund at the date of publication, and roles, fund sizes and mandates may have changed since. Sixteen self-descriptions are a dated, qualitative sample. They show how particular funds say they decide, and they say nothing about how often any pattern holds across climate capital.

Fund fit decides whether the rest can happen

Fit covers stage, geography, cheque size, ownership needs, sector mandate and the kind of risk a fund is set up to take. It is the first gate because every later step assumes it. A fund that cannot own enough of the outcome will not reach commercial terms, however clear the deck.

This is where founders lose the most time. A polite pass from a fund that was never going to write the cheque reads like feedback, and the natural response is to rework the material. Brighter Future will not treat a pass from a fund that could never write the cheque as feedback on the story. Before anyone touches the deck, we check each fund that passed against the company as it stands. We look at the fund's stage, cheque range, ownership target and the size of outcome its model needs. Only the remaining passes count as evidence about the material.

Commercial terms come before the science is tested

Several investors place the price of a deal ahead of the deepest technical check. Anthony Chow, co-founder of the London-listed investment company Agronomics, described its order in his interview. “Prior to the technical DD, we establish commercial terms, because there's no point in doing the technical DD unless you have agreed in principle on the commercial terms. If the technical due-diligence does not support the original commercial terms, then they would need to be tweaked.” Because the field is interdisciplinary, he added, “we have a panel of experts that we call upon depending on the nature of the company we're doing a deep dive on.”

Myke Näf, a founding partner at the European pre-seed and seed fund Übermorgen Ventures, gave a similar sequence. The process “typically involves initial discussions led by an excited deal champion, a partner meeting with the founders, term sheet negotiation, legal and financial review, and technology diligence which may involve experts for specialised fields.” Josep Oriol, managing partner of Okavango Capital, which backs nature businesses in Africa, described the firm agreeing a term sheet, taking it to the board or investment committee for initial approval and then proceeding “to full due diligence”.

For a founder, the consequence is practical. The claims in the deck are priced into terms before experts test them, and diligence then either confirms that price or moves it. A claim stated at a level the evidence cannot hold does its damage after the founder thinks the negotiation is over.

Diligence checks what the founder said earlier

Carlota Ochoa Neven Du Mont described Extantia Capital’s diligence in two parts. Before the term sheet the fund studies the technology, business model, runway and intellectual property. After it, the team runs confirmatory diligence on the founders’ key claims. “A deal usually only falls apart at the post-term sheet stage if the founding team hasn’t been open with us.”

At Green Angel Ventures, Nick Lyth described a process that covers 14 to 15 areas and takes time by design. “If there's a need for speed, we nearly always tell them to look for funding somewhere else.” He put the minimum at six weeks.

Read together, those accounts turn the pitch into the first draft of a diligence list. Whatever the founder said loosely in the meeting comes back as a claim to verify, and a raise planned on a short timetable has already ruled out some of the funds the founder means to approach.

The committee hears the case without the founder

The last room is one the founder rarely enters. Michael Dean, a founding partner of the food and agriculture investor AgFunder, described its sequence. An associate takes the first call, a partner joins if the deal team is interested, promising founders pitch to the whole team, and the fund visits, analyses the business and speaks to customers. “Our investment memorandum outlines potential risks, and the EIC votes on the deal.” The EIC is the committee that makes the investment decision.

The Belief Gap, our 2026 guide to the research on why sound cases stall, found no study of investment committees equivalent to the research on corporate boards, and these interviews do not fill that gap. They are investors describing their own committees in 2024 and 2025. What they show is who carries the case into that room. Näf’s “excited deal champion” starts it. Dean’s associates and partners write it down. The memorandum records the risks in the fund’s words, and the vote happens on that document.

Dean’s description of the vote ends on a sentence that sets the founder’s real audience. “While a partner can push a deal through without unanimous support, we aim for consensus among the three partners.” The case a founder builds has to reach the two partners who did not take the meeting, through a memorandum someone else wrote, with the risks already named. A founder can prepare for that by drafting the risk section of the memorandum before the meeting, in the fund’s terms, and checking that the deck answers each risk on the same page as the claim it qualifies.

When the partner who liked a company has to carry it into committee, our investor storytelling work prepares the written answers they will need, from the teaser to the diligence questions. The company's finance team owns the figures.

Sources and further reading

• Benjamin Wochner, Kopa Ventures, investor interview
• Abe Murray, AlleyCorp, investor interview
• Danny Brown, MaC Venture Capital, investor interview
• Anthony Chow, Agronomics, investor interview
• Myke Näf, Übermorgen Ventures, investor interview
• Josep Oriol, Okavango Capital, investor interview
• Carlota Ochoa Neven Du Mont, Extantia Capital, investor interview
• Nick Lyth, Green Angel Ventures, investor interview
• Michael Dean, AgFunder, investor interview
• What an Investor Deck Actually Has to Make Easy to Decide
• I Believe You. I Cannot Sign This.