Investor Research
How to Build the Perfect Investor Target List
The Time-Saving Guide. Discover how to build a precise, actionable investor target list that actually converts to meetings with VCs and investors.
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Learn why warm introductions convert 5-10x better than cold emails, and how network analysis tools automatically surface hundreds of hidden intro paths to your target investors.
Mark Bugas
![What is Network Analysis for Fundraising? [Complete Guide + Real Results]](/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fus-west-2.graphassets.com%2Fcm9f6alo0008a01ura7glbzp9%2Fcmj0jmbcd53dm07lpbjtpuqbb&w=3840&q=75)
Network analysis for fundraising systematically maps connections between founders and target investors to identify warm introduction paths – the most effective way to secure investor meetings. Unlike manual LinkedIn scrolling or guesswork, network analysis tools score relationship strength across your entire professional graph (contacts, colleagues, portfolio connections) to surface the optimal introducers. Research shows warm introductions lead to 13x higher chances of securing funding than cold emails, and are 5-10x more effective at converting to investor meetings. Cold emails typically see 1-7.5% response rates while warm introductions can achieve response rates up to 60% depending on the strength of the relationship.
Fundraising success isn't only about having the best product or the most impressive metrics – it's about getting in front of the right investors through the right channels. The data is clear: warm introductions dramatically outperform every other outreach method.
The conversion gap is massive:
Data from Harvard Business School reveals that professional networks and referrals drive ~60% of all venture deal flow in the US, while cold email accounts for just 10% (and a near-zero percentage of actual funded equity)
The response rate gap tells the same story:
That’s not a marginal difference. If you need 20 investor meetings to close your round, the workload is stark: you either need roughly 25–30 high-quality warm intros or 400–2,000 cold emails to generate the same number of meetings.
VCs are drowning in pitch decks. Top-tier firms receive 1,000+ cold pitches monthly, if not weekly. Your carefully crafted email is competing with hundreds of others, all claiming to be "the next big thing." Without social proof, you're just noise.
Warm introductions solve the credibility problem. When your existing investor emails their partner at another firm saying "You should meet this founder," they're putting their reputation on the line. When a portfolio founder makes an intro, the VC knows that founder has been vetted and trusts their judgment. The introduction isn't just opening the door – it's pre-validating you before you even walk in.
The introduction isn't just opening the door – it's pre-validating you before you even walk in.
Most founders dramatically underestimate their network reach. You're not just connected to your 500 first-degree LinkedIn connections – you have potential access to their networks too. That's potentially 100,000+ second-degree connections and millions of third-degree connections.
The problem? Manually mapping those connections is impossible at scale. You can't realistically ask every person you know "Who do you know at Sequoia? At Andreessen Horowitz? At Benchmark?" for 50+ target firms. You'll burn out your network asking for help before you even start your real outreach.
In theory, you could review every investor’s profile and map mutual connections one by one – but at a list size of 100+ investors, that manual process becomes unmanageable.
This is where network analysis becomes critical. The right tool surfaces introduction paths you didn't know existed and prioritizes them based on actual relationship strength. Automatically.
Before network analysis tools existed, founders had to map their networks manually. The process was brutal and time-consuming.
Some sophisticated founders built elaborate tracking systems. They'd create spreadsheets with columns for: investor name, firm, stage focus, sector focus, mutual connection #1, relationship strength (1-5), mutual connection #2, relationship strength, notes on best approach, outreach status, date contacted, and response.
This worked better than pure manual hunting, but still had problems. The data went stale quickly. People changed jobs, relationships shifted, new connections formed – but your spreadsheet stayed frozen in time. Updating it required another manual research cycle.
You still had to manually discover the connections. The spreadsheet organized information you already found, but didn't help you find it in the first place.
Collaborative mapping was impossible. If you had co-founders or advisors, combining your networks meant comparing multiple spreadsheets and deduplicating data. No one actually did this systematically.
Network analysis tools solve the manual mapping problem by automatically crawling your professional networks and building a relationship graph in the background.
These tools connect to your Gmail, LinkedIn, Google Calendar, and other professional platforms. They import your contacts, investor meetings to build a complete picture of your network.
Leading tools maintain databases of investors with 10,000+ VCs, angels, and firm partners. You can filter by stage, sector, geography to build target lists, then see which targets have warm intro paths through your network.
Upload or create a target list of 100 investors and instantly see network coverage across all of them. The tool highlights which investors have strong warm intro paths, which have weak paths, and which require cold outreach – allowing you to prioritize strategically.
Building proprietary relationship intelligence is expensive and complex - requiring years of engineering, ongoing data maintenance, and sophisticated algorithms. Most platforms in this space take shortcuts.
Some providers offer "relationship intelligence as a service" through APIs that other platforms can license. Village.do, for example, explicitly markets a white-label API solution with the pitch: "Integrate in just 1 week, compared to 1.5 years building in-house" and "Save $1.5M+ costs."
This build-vs-buy decision is common across the industry. Licensing third-party APIs offers speed to market, but creates structural dependency: if the provider's data quality degrades, their API changes, or they adjust pricing, every platform relying on that infrastructure inherits the impact. You're building your core feature on someone else's foundation.
Other platforms limit analysis to data users already control:
Signal by NFX analyzes your Gmail to map connections to VCs in their database. While useful for surfacing email-based relationships, it's limited to connections you've already contacted directly - it can't discover new paths through your extended network
Whether relying on third-party APIs or limiting analysis to user-provided data, these approaches share a fundamental weakness: they don't build comprehensive, proprietary relationship graphs. When data is incomplete, stale, or limited in scope, the intro paths they suggest often don't work in practice.
This is why Flowlie took a different approach.
When you rely on third-party data sources, you inherit their limitations and errors. Public data aggregators have incomplete information, outdated records, and limited visibility into actual relationship strength.
If a critical data source changes their API, raises prices, or shuts down access, platforms dependent on them break. You're building on someone else's foundation – and that foundation can shift at any moment.
By building in-house data collection and enrichment, Flowlie ensures every data point meets their quality standards. If something's wrong, they can fix it at the source rather than waiting for a third-party vendor to address issues.
Generic network analysis tools serve sales teams, recruiters, and business development. Fundraising has unique dynamics: the relationship between a founder and their existing investor matters differently than a sales rep's relationship with a prospect. For example, Flowlie's algorithm prioritizes portfolio founder connections higher than generic mutual connections, because VCs trust referrals from their portfolio founders more than anyone else.
Everything runs on Flowlie's infrastructure. If they need to add a new data source, change how relationship scoring works, or build custom features, they can do it immediately without negotiating with vendors or working around API limitations.
When you control the full stack – data collection, enrichment, relationship scoring, and path identification – you can optimize every component for accuracy.
In fundraising, false positives are expensive. If a tool suggests someone can make a warm intro and they can't, you've wasted social capital and potentially damaged a relationship. If it misses a strong intro path, you might go cold to an investor you could have reached warm – tanking your response rate from potentially 60% down to 6%.
Flowlie's in-house approach allows them to validate accuracy against real fundraising outcomes. They can see which introduction paths actually resulted in meetings, iterate on scoring models, and continuously improve the algorithm based on what works in practice.
When founders connect their networks to Flowlie, the results are consistent: they discover warm introduction paths they didn't know existed.
Ajax, raising a $1.5M pre-seed, uploaded a target list of 300+ investors. Flowlie's network analysis revealed 2,700+ warm introduction paths to those investors. By focusing on the highest-quality paths, the founding team secured 20+ initial meetings and closed their round in just 2 weeks.
Datavations, raising a $17M Series A in a down market, needed to identify the right investors from a universe of 10,000+ potential firms. Flowlie filtered down to 395 active, high-fit Series A investors, then discovered 3,200+ warm intro paths through the founder's network. The systematic approach to relationship mapping led to 70+ initial meetings with an 80% conversion rate to follow-up meetings – dramatically higher than typical cold outreach results.
The pattern: founders typically discover hundreds to thousands of warm intro paths when they systematically map their extended network. The key is having the technology to surface these paths and score them based on actual relationship strength, not just "mutual connection" visibility.
Network analysis is incredibly powerful, but it's not the only tool in your fundraising toolkit. Understanding when to use it versus other approaches maximizes your effectiveness.
Use network analysis when:
Warm introductions matter most at stages where VCs are the primary investors. Angels and family offices may be more receptive to cold outreach, but VCs prioritize warm intros almost exclusively.
If you have zero professional connections, network analysis tools won't help much. But if you've worked at companies, attended accelerators, or built any professional relationships, you likely have more latent network value than you realize.
Network analysis pays off at scale. Manually mapping connections to 5 investors is annoying but doable. Mapping connections to 50+ investors is where automation becomes essential.
Time is valuable. If you can spend 2 hours using network analysis to get the same results that would take 20 hours of manual LinkedIn stalking, the ROI is obvious. For busy founders already wearing ten hats, efficiency matters.
Sometimes the best-fit investor for your business simply isn't in your network. If they're investing at your stage, in your sector, and recently backed similar companies, they're worth a cold email even without an intro.
After you've gone through your network and gotten intros to everyone accessible, cold outreach becomes the Plan B for filling out the rest of your target list.
Most successful fundraises use both warm intros and strategic cold outreach.
Build your initial target list and use network analysis to identify which investors have strong warm intro paths. Begin outreach there to build momentum and get early meetings scheduled.
As you're waiting for warm intro responses and scheduling meetings, start cold outreach to high-priority targets where you don't have warm paths.
Attend events, join founder communities, and connect with portfolio founders at your target firms. These activities expand your network in real-time, creating new warm intro paths even mid-fundraise.
Once you have a few investor meetings scheduled, you can create urgency. "I'm meeting with [other firms] next week and would love to include you" gives investors FOMO and can make even cold outreach more effective.
Having access to network analysis is one thing. Using it effectively is another. Follow these principles to maximize your warm intro conversion rate.
Don't wait until you're actively fundraising to connect your network data to analysis tools. Do this months before your raise so you can:
Not all connectors are equal.
When you ask someone to make an introduction, don't make them do work. Provide:
Keep detailed records of:
This prevents you from double-asking people, helps you follow up appropriately, and generates data on which types of intro paths work best for future rounds.
Network analysis is most powerful when your network is strong. Actively work to:
Network analysis for fundraising is technology that systematically maps connections between founders and target investors to identify warm introduction paths. These tools analyze your professional networks (LinkedIn, email, calendar) to show which investors you can reach through mutual connections, scoring relationship strength at each step.
Warm introductions solve the credibility problem VCs face – top venture firms receive 1,000+ pitches monthly, and without social proof, your email is just noise. When your existing investor or a portfolio founder makes an introduction, they're putting their reputation on the line, which pre-validates you before the meeting. Research shows warm introductions lead to 13x higher chances of securing funding compared to cold emails, and are 5-10x more effective at converting to investor meetings. Cold emails typically see 1-7.5% response rates while warm introductions achieve 10-60% response rates depending on relationship strength.
Flowlie built their network analysis entirely in-house rather than licensing third-party data. This proprietary approach delivers measurable results: founders using Flowlie typically discover hundreds to thousands of warm intro paths in their target lists. The system surfaces portfolio founder connections (which VCs trust most), factors in relationship recency, and validates which paths actually result in meetings – continuously improving based on real fundraising outcomes.
It depends. Network analysis is most valuable when you have at least some professional connections – prior work experience, accelerator participation, or industry relationships. The tool surfaces hidden network value you might not realize exists. However, if you truly have zero network (new graduate with no work history, no startup ecosystem participation), network analysis won't create connections that don't exist. In that case, focus on building your network first through founder communities, events, and ecosystem participation before your fundraise.
Most network analysis tools connect your accounts in seconds and begin showing results shortly after. Depending on the size of the list, the whole process can take from 2 minutes to 24 hours, depending on the list size.
If network analysis reveals you have zero warm paths to a critical target investor, you have several options: (1) Cold outreach with a highly personalized email referencing their recent investments or published thesis, (2) Expand your network strategically by connecting with portfolio founders at that firm, (3) Ask your existing investors or advisors if they can make indirect introductions through their networks, or (4) Adjust your target list to prioritize investors where you do have strong warm paths.
Yes! Your existing investors should be your first call when building your target list for the next round. They have the strongest vested interest in helping you succeed. Network analysis can show you which new investors your existing investors are connected to, allowing you to prioritize asks strategically. Most existing investors expect to make introductions for their portfolio companies and have built relationships with other VCs specifically for this purpose. The key is providing them with a clear target list and making the introduction process easy with forwardable blurbs.
A strong connection is someone you've worked with directly, communicate with regularly, or have an ongoing relationship with – not just someone you're connected to on LinkedIn. Before asking for an introduction, consider: Would this person take your call immediately? Would they vouch for your credibility? If the answer is yes, they're likely a strong enough connection. If you haven't spoken in years or only met once briefly, they're probably too weak to make a valuable introduction.
Yes – many founders and fundraising advisors use network analysis collaboratively. Flowlie specifically offers multi-account functionality where advisors can manage multiple founder accounts simultaneously, seeing each founder's unique network and helping coordinate intro requests across their entire client portfolio. This prevents duplication (two founders asking the same connector for different intros) and allows advisors to strategically leverage their own networks alongside their clients'. Advisors working with 5-10 active fundraising clients can expand searchable networks significantly by combining everyone's connections.
This is common and doesn't reflect poorly on you or the connector. Investors receive dozens of introductions weekly and can't respond to all of them. Wait 5-7 days, then ask your connector if they'd be comfortable sending a follow-up nudge. If the investor still doesn't respond after one follow-up, mark them as "passed" in your pipeline and move on – silence is typically a soft pass. Don't burn social capital asking for multiple follow-ups. Instead, focus on the investors who are responsive. Thank your connector regardless of the outcome since they spent social capital on your behalf.
Yes, but international founders should focus on building cross-border network bridges. Many accelerators (Y Combinator, Techstars, 500 Global) have international cohorts that create networks with US investors. Investors with portfolio companies in your home country may have relationships with local founders who can make introductions. The key is being strategic about which investors to target – those who actively invest internationally or have portfolio companies in your region are most receptive.
Start with a brief, direct email: "Hey [Name], I'm raising a $2M seed round for [Company]. We're [one-line description]. I saw you're connected to [Investor] at [Firm], and they're a great fit given their recent investment in [Similar Company]. Would you be comfortable making an intro? Happy to send a forwardable blurb if helpful." If they agree, immediately send a clean forwardable email with 2-3 sentences on what you do and your most impressive traction. Make it effortless for them – they should be able to forward your email directly with minimal editing.
No. This comes across as impersonal or surveillance-like. Instead, frame it naturally: "I noticed we're both connected to [Investor]" or "I saw from LinkedIn that you know [Investor]." The connector doesn't need to know you used technology to discover the relationship. What matters is that you're asking respectfully, providing context on why this investor is a good fit, and making the introduction process easy for them. Focus on the value of the introduction rather than the mechanism of discovery.
Prioritize based on relationship strength and credibility. If you can reach an investor through your existing investor or through a portfolio founder, those paths are stronger than a mutual college connection. Use network analysis scoring to identify the highest-value path, then pursue that first. Only if that path fails (connector declines or investor doesn't respond) should you try alternative paths. Never ask multiple connectors simultaneously for the same intro – this creates confusion and wastes social capital if multiple people reach out on your behalf.
Stop guessing who can introduce you to investors. Flowlie's network analysis reveals warm introduction paths you didn't know existed and prioritizes them based on relationship strength – helping you focus on the investors most likely to take meetings.
Join thousands of founders using our technology to find the right investors and close rounds faster than ever before.
The Time-Saving Guide. Discover how to build a precise, actionable investor target list that actually converts to meetings with VCs and investors.
Find out why data-driven investor targeting outperforms random networking, helping you build relationships with the right investors.