Causo for Fundraising - Pitch the right VCs, skip the grind
by•
90% of startups die from no money, not bad products. Causo's AI agents find matching investors and email them for you while you ship.
Upload your deck or website, get matched with specific partners at relevant VC funds, send your pitch. All on autopilot.
Let our raccoons do the work while you ship product and talk to customers.
Replies
Causo
@dawid_baranowski
Love that you called out the claude/chatgpt hallucination problem. i’ve had ai 'find' me vcs that haven't existed since 2018. having a live-enriched database down to the individual partner level is the only way this actually works. rooting for #1 today...
Causo
@priya_kushwaha1 Oh I know the pain Priya - one of the things we encountered when prototyping Causo a while back 😅 even if no hallucinations happen, training data will often have very outdated information, so you might see a partner that is no longer with a given fund.
The data finding happens with the use of a couple of different agents that find sources and cross-reference things (plus our manual spot checks) to make sure the info we have is up to date and correct :)
Causo
@dawid_baranowski @priya_kushwaha1
Thank you so much Priya! No way of knowing how it is going yet, but one can only hope!
@dawid_baranowski Congrats on the launch Dawid. I love the "don't hallucinate" comment :)
Causo
@zolani_matebese Also gotta remember "don't make mistakes"
@dawid_baranowski Just curious, how does it fix the low reply rate problem? At some point, if enough people use it, won't it result in decreasing the rate further?
Causo
@_yguy_ Hey Yusuf, depends what you mean by low reply rate problem. If you mean that globally, founders struggle getting replies from VCs - this is a fuzzy problem, as it can have many root causes:
-email was bad
-company / deck was not a fit for the VC
-email sent from a managed service (mailchimp / sendgrid) or from not warmed up domain
Causo does help with these by writing hyper-personalised and context rich emails, finding the best fit VCs, and sending emails through your real inbox.
But this is of course not a guarantee of a reply - your company still needs to be genuinely investable.
Other than that, do I believe that many people using Causo will contribute to a global reply rate collapse? No - those people would still be emailing VCs, just with other products or in other ways :)
@dawid_baranowski Now that you put it that way, it makes sense. All the best.
Causo
@_yguy_ Appreciate you, all the best to you!
@dawid_baranowski Powodzenia Dawid:)
Causo
@gregstefaniak Dzieki!!
Elentaria
Congrats @dawid_baranowski , a must have tool for founders, specially the 1st-time-to-raise ones.
QQ, the platform sources and does the outreach to the VCs and angels, right? or just sources the best matches?
Causo
@khashayar_mansourizadeh1 Thank you! Causo also finds contacts and does outreach. You get hyper-personalised emails automatically generated and sent from your own email.
You can review every email before sending (we don't use templates at all), and every email is rich with context about your company, the details of your fundraise, and the details of the specific partner you're emailing :)
Elentaria
@dawid_baranowski nice, and not sure if you'd like to share, but do you use a 3rd party sequencing engine? or you have built your own? or you don't operate with sequencing logic and treat each email/msg as a stand-alone task to be executed?
Causo
@khashayar_mansourizadeh1 our tech stack is a mix of proprietary tech and best in class libraries and technologies :)
Causo
@dawid_baranowski @khashayar_mansourizadeh1
Thank you Khashayar! You got the intention right!
Really hope to give more founders a chance... So many people give up 10-20 emails in, and their cool stuff gets lost for ever.
Elentaria
@dawid_baranowski @ivan_sem exactly, honestly, the best benefit of AI in cold outreach (to clients, investors, partners, etc.) is the fact that AI has no feelings, won't be disappointed and give up soon, and can be super consistent, so totally agree on the value.
But a side note, based on experience I know that a lot of investors (angle or VC or PE), invest on warmly introduced teams through their own network, so it might be interesting to see how AI can help to build that network too.
@dawid_baranowski @ivan_sem Congrats on the launch 🚀 How do you handle the relevance signal? Does Causo match on stage + sector only, or does it factor in things like check size, recent deal activity, or thesis alignment? Building an investor list right now for pre-seed and “match quality” is the hardest part.
Causo
@ivan_sem @francesco2689 Hey Francesco, thanks!
We do matching in two ways:
-stage + sector + geography fit as 1st pass: filters out investors that aren't active at the right stage or in the right category, passes the ones active
-alignment scoring as 2nd pass: agents score all the matched funds by closeness of fit, looking at recent activity, thesis alignment, recent raises, etc
It's a tricky question in the real world: some VCs will invest in a company of a certain kind and look to write more similar checks; others prefer to bet on a single company in a given niche. @ivan_sem spent years working as a VC and I'm from the other side of the table, so we tried to create a product that reflected our lived experience in the sector and best practices :)
We have a 50% off for the 1st month offer on the launch - do feel free to give Causo a spin and see what matches we find :)
Causo
@dawid_baranowski @francesco2689 Good question, this is the part we obsess over tbh.
Stage and sector are just the floor. On top we factor in geo, check size fit, recent investments, social posts, podcast and interview appearances, website signals. Basically if it's on the internet we try to find it. Partner-level is where the real signal hides, a fund can look perfect on paper but one partner is writing this quarter and another hasn't done a deal in 18 months, or not touching a certain space.
Causo
Hey PH - Ivan here.
Fundraising today is still painfully manual:
finding the right funds, figuring out the right partner, writing outreach, tracking replies... repeat for months.
We built Causo to automate the entire workflow.
Upload your deck, and Causo’s agents:
find relevant investors
identify the right people at each fund
research them using live data
craft personalized outreach
monitor campaigns and replies
No stale VC databases. No hallucinated matches. Just targeted fundraising outreach that actually saves founders time.
Would love your feedback 🙏
Cool new launch guys. I like the free investors database - I'm not quite ready to raise. How often do you refresh the vc info?
Causo
@mike_hill7 Hey Mike - Causo is powered by lots of very busy AI agents that scour the open internet for updates about VCs. The database get updated daily: recent fundraises by VCs, notable portfolio investments, and news down to the individual partner level.
Once you upload your deck and website, we use the VC info to match you with the right partners at funds that are most likely to invest in companies like yours :)
Causo
@mike_hill7 Thnx Mike! Happy to see you here again!
Taking a deck and turning it into an end-to-end outreach campaign is a perfect use case for multi-step agents. Since Causo is monitoring the campaigns, I'm wondering how it handles the data logging. Does it integrate directly with CRMs like Salesforce to log these touchpoints, or does it act as a standalone dashboard for the raise?
Causo
@vanshvardhan_sorte Great question! As of today, we map replies from VCs to emails - and hand it over to the user to continue the conversation. Sentiment mapping (automatically analyzing if the reply was positive or negative and feeding that into improving future emails) as well as CRM integrations are roadmap items in the Soon bucket :)
Thank you for your support!
Love the honesty ... "$80M raised and it was NOT fun" is the most relatable founder line I've read this week 😅
The bet on a live-enriched DB vs prompting an LLM is the right one. LLMs confidently pitching you to partners who left the fund 18 months ago is a real failure mode.
Two questions:
How fresh is "live"? If a partner moved firms last Tuesday, when does Causo know?
Does it learn from outcomes ... e.g. if a thesis-match looked perfect on paper but the partner ghosted three founders in a row, does that signal feed back into ranking?
Rooting for the raccoon 🦝
Causo
@tery_emilson Hey Tery, appreciate your kind words! And thank you, we try to be direct - much inspiration from PostHog for our voice and branding.
To your points,
1. We tend to catch news on a same day basis, so the scenario of someone leaving a firm should be caught on the same day it's made public - this is the only caveat. We do rely on public data sources (and some private databases), so any moves made in full stealth might be caught not in real time.
2. This is a great point. Currently, we don't yet track things that happen after a VC's initial reply. In the near future, we want to track sentiment of replies (positive or negative, which will improve founders' campaigns), and if/when we start ingesting info about founder-VC interactions downstream of outreach, we could also potentially inform scoring. A real world concern that comes to mind is what we mean by ghosting a founder: did the VC stop replying because something was not to their liking in their conversation (VCs are feeble beasts and whether you get a reply or not can also depend on your own company and product); or did the VC commit to something, but not pull through on their commitment? This particular bit sounds like it would need more thought from us and we haven't gotten to this exact point yet :)
Thanks again for your support, it means the world!
Causo
@mazin_assaf Appreciate you Mazin! Hope you raise lots with Causo 🙏🙏
Causo
@mazin_assaf Thank you Maz!
Always grateful for your feedback!
Onboarding right now - stoked for this!
Causo
@will_hickl Can't wait to hear what you think!
Causo
@will_hickl @dawid_baranowski
Thanks a lot Will! Please let us know if you have any feedback!
Congrats, guys, you're shipping faster than Anthropic 😂
Btw how do you avoid these emails getting into spam folder?
Causo
@nelly_orlova the power of two people, a lot of agents, and enough caffeine to alarm a cardiologist :))
Outreach on Causo goes from your own email - not from a managed outbox like for marketing emails (eg Sendgrid, Mailchimp). Landing in inbox should be easy if your domain is healthy, and warmed up. We have guides and suggested sending limits inside Causo to make sure you aren't sending too many emails per day, which would risk hurting your deliverability:)
Causo
@nelly_orlova Thank you!