Fundraising

How it works

The mechanics of this kit, plainly — what runs and when, where the data lands, and what you look at.

• Raise sweep runs weekday mornings · 8am and keeps the The raise dashboard fresh. Each working morning while the raise is open — reads what arrived, moves a stage only where the evidence shows it, and redraws who has gone quiet.
• What is captured lands in the Investor pipeline record, which lives at Data/Investor Pipeline in your vault — yours to open, search, and edit like any other file.
• What is captured lands in the Data room needs record, which lives at Data/Data Room Needs in your vault — yours to open, search, and edit like any other file.
• The The raise dashboard reads from the record and shows, at a glance: conversations on the register · committed so far · asked for, not yet sent · the raise, stage by stage · gone quiet — longest since the last word · warm intros still to land · the data room, item by item · the raise against your runway · every conversation, where it stands · the register — tap an investor to open it · how this board works.

The wiring, in one breath: Larch holds Conversation capture · Larch holds Intro drafts · Conversation capture writes to Investor pipeline · Raise sweep writes to Investor pipeline · Conversation capture writes to Data room needs · Raise sweep writes to Data room needs · Investor pipeline shown by The raise · Data room needs shown by The raise · The raise kept fresh by Raise sweep · Raise sweep run by Larch.

Getting the most from it

A kit earns its place when it changes what you look at and what you say, not when it is installed. This is the rhythm that makes it pay.

• Let the first sweep do the archaeology, then spend ten minutes correcting it. Larch reads a year of your email and calendar and puts every investor conversation on one register at the stage the evidence showed — and it will have filed a customer, a recruiter or two as investors. Setting those aside, and saying what you actually call each stage, is the whole set-up; it never needs doing again.
• Read Gone quiet on a Monday, after the sweep has been through. It is the only panel that asks anything of you: more than twenty-one days since the last word, longest first, with the funded and declined never on it. Larch will not tell you what the silence means and will not tell you to chase — that judgement is yours, and the panel exists so you make it on purpose rather than by accident.
• Watch Asked for, not yet sent rather than the tick count. The data room list has two kinds of gap: things you have not written, and things an investor has actually asked you for and not received. Only the second is anybody waiting on you, and it is the one number on the board worth clearing to zero every week.
• Say what happened in the moment, in your own words — "Contoso passed", "Fabrikam want the cohort numbers by Friday", "Aisha is in for two-fifty". The register keeps up, the ask lands on the data room list with who asked, and you never have to reconstruct a raise from an inbox at eleven at night.
• Record who made each introduction, every time. Warm intro via is the field that gets forgotten first and matters most: it is what Warm intros still to land is drawn from, and it is the list of people who deserve a thank-you when the round closes.
• Tell Larch when the raise opens and when it closes. While you have said it is not open the Raise sweep does nothing and says nothing — no daily reminder of a raise nobody is running — and the register sits there intact, ready to be read against the next round.

Make it yours

Nothing here is fixed. The pieces are ordinary agents, routines, records and dashboards, so anything you know about shaping those applies. Retire whatever earns nothing.

Things people usually change first

Say any of these in chat, or edit them on the kit’s page in the app.

• Whether the raise is open. Say it once and the sweep runs; say it is closed or paused and the sweep does nothing and says nothing until you say otherwise.
• What you call your stages. The register stores six fixed ones so the funnel can be drawn in order, but Larch speaks in your words — "first call", "the partner pitch", "they passed" — once you have given them.
• Which senders are never investors: recruiters, banks, accelerator mailing lists, a fund's newsletter. Say so once and the sweep stops filing them.
• When the sweep runs, or pausing it and keeping the register by hand — a conversation you mention in passing is captured either way.
• How a forwardable blurb is written: its length, how it opens, the words you never use. Rewrite one and Larch keeps what you changed.
• What happens to something that was never an investor: set it aside and the row keeps its history while leaving the funnel and every figure.

Your first run

Installing starts a short setup conversation — not a form. Answer roughly, correct later.

1. Adding the Kit leads with the sweep, not a conversation: the arrival screen asks for email and calendar and offers one explicit "Run the first sweep" tap, because a year of investor threads and meetings is the thing this Kit is for and the grant is the pitch. Nothing runs until you tap it, and the run uses credits like any other.
2. The sweep reads back twelve months for threads with someone at a fund, an angel or a syndicate about investing in your company — a deck sent, a model asked for, terms exchanged, a pass — plus the meetings on your calendar with those people. Each becomes one row on the Investor pipeline with the firm, the stage the evidence showed, when you were last in touch and the next thing you said you would send. Cheque sizes are left blank: those are your figures, not something to infer from a fund's size.
3. When it finishes it leaves a note in your 1Presence inbox in Larch's voice saying how many conversations it found across how many firms, and inviting a few minutes to go through them. That calibration is where the Kit actually gets set up: whether a raise is live at all, which of those are really investors, what you call each stage in your own words, roughly what each might write, and who opened the door.
4. You can skip the sweep. Larch then opens with "Meet Larch" instead and builds the register from what you tell it, one conversation at a time, with nothing outside your own records read at all.
5. From then on the Raise sweep runs on weekday mornings while you have said the raise is open: it moves a stage only where the mail or the diary plainly shows it moved, files the next steps you committed to, puts what an investor asked for on the data room list with who asked, redraws the board, and raises a card only when something moved or something is due today.

Watch the first pass, then tell it what you would have done differently — that correction teaches it more than any setup could.

The essentials

Learning, preferences and run costs work the same in every kit — so they are covered once, in the Kits guide.

Living with a Kit — the Kits guide →

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