Investors don't fund pitches. They fund people they already know.

Signal NYC · Recap

Thank you to everyone who came out to Signal NYC

On October 15, we hosted our first investor event at Reserve Padel in Hudson Yards. GPs, family offices, angel and syndicate leads, LPs and emerging fund managers spent the afternoon playing padel, talking shop and meeting people they should have met years ago.

Thank you for showing up, and for making it an afternoon where nobody pitched and everybody connected.

The photos are up.

Welcome

Welcome to our newsletter

This is the first issue. Every week we’ll share what we’re hearing from investors, what’s working in raises right now, and the data behind it. No fluff. Honest odds.

Which brings us to this week’s topic.

This week

Investors don’t fund pitches. They fund people they already know.

Most founders run fundraising like sales. Build a list. Write the pitch. Send it to everyone. It feels productive. It’s also the narrowest door into a venture firm.

In the largest survey of VC decision-making we know of, covering hundreds of institutional firms, only 10% of deals came inbound from company management. Over 30% came through VCs’ professional networks, another 20% were referred by other investors, and 8% came from portfolio companies (Gompers et al., Journal of Financial Economics).

Read that again. One in ten.

The funnel is brutal even after you’re in it. The average firm screened more than 400 companies and made only five investments in a year, and for each deal a firm closed, it considered roughly 100 opportunities.

And in 2026, the room is getting smaller. US startups on Carta raised $3.19 billion across more than 11,500 pre-seed SAFEs and notes in Q2 2026, versus $3.22 billion across 14,825 instruments a year earlier. The average instrument hit $276,000, up 27% year over year and a record high (Carta). Same money. Fewer founders getting it.

From the field

What it looks like from the other side of the table

We’ve worked on more than 300 raises, and the pattern is hard to miss. The founder who closes in eight weeks and the one who grinds for nine months usually have similar products. What’s different is who vouched for them before they walked in.

There’s a reason that matters so much. In that same survey, VCs ranked the management team as the most important factor in deciding whether to invest, named by 47% of firms as their top factor. Investors are betting on you. A relationship is how they get to know you before the deck does the talking.

The flip side is real too. Investors talk to each other. A mass-blasted raise gets noticed, and a bad first impression rarely gets a second chance.

Three things to do before your next raise

1. 1

   Start before the ask. Get on investors’ radar months before you need the money. Short, real updates beat a cold pitch every time.

2. 2

   Get vouched for. A referral from another investor or a portfolio founder is one of the biggest ways deals get done. Ask the people who already believe in you.

3. 3

   Pick rooms, not lists. Twenty investors whose thesis fits you will outperform two hundred who don’t. Go where the right ones already are.

Investor Signals

Where we come in

Investor Signals was built on exactly this. Nearly a decade of relationships with HNWIs, family offices, VCs, micro-VCs, angel networks and syndicates, built by hand by a team with five combined exits and 300+ startup raises behind it.

This year we passed 100+ successful engagements, connecting startups with investors through warm, pre-confirmed introductions. Flat fee per meeting. No success fees. No equity.

We’re not a database. We talk to investors every week, and we know what they’re actually looking for.

Thanks again for being part of this. More next week.

The Investor Signals team

Sister company

Synapse Network

Our sister company, Synapse Network, is an invitation-only network for fund managers, LPs, family offices and lenders. Membership comes with a 60-day free trial.