Automate Fundraising Process with AI

As the CEO of a tech startup, money is always on my mind. We have a lot we want to do as a company, and it’s my job to ensure we have the funding to support our ambitions.

Tech fundraising is harder now than it was a few years ago. Granted, Bardeen—our AI automation platform—is in a space VCs want to explore. However, I’ve also experimented with automating parts of the fundraising process. So far, we’ve raised $22 million, almost all of which was assisted by our own AI.

Of course, there’s been some trial and error as I’ve attempted different AI-driven approaches, but overall, it’s been a success. Here’s what I’ve learned—and what you can do if you’re looking to increase your fundraising.

Key takeaways

• When looking at fundraising as a funnel problem, it’s clear AI can help founders and CEOs streamline the process.
• AI can help in four significant ways:
  • Identifying likely investors
  • Doing personalized outreach at scale
  • Testing the effectiveness of your pitch deck
  • Sending follow-ups at the right time
• Use AI to automate repetitive tasks to enable founders to focus on the important steps, like honing your messaging and having successful meetings.

Fundraising is a funnel problem

I believe everything in life is essentially a funnel problem—and the same is true of fundraising. It’s like a sales or recruiting funnel. You have to ask: Where do I find the most likely candidates? How do I reach out to them? How do I track who’s responding and use that data to make my future efforts more efficient? In a sales funnel, almost everyone uses AI in some shape or form; if I’m doing the same type of work, I should also be using AI.

Many fundraising rounds, including those I’ve seen at past companies, rely heavily on one lead or introduction to build a network. Realistically, some of the people you speak with won’t be the right fit as an investor. However, if you have only three meetings lined up and all three say no, that’s a scary place to be.

Expanding your fundraising funnel has two main benefits. First, getting a “no” isn’t a huge setback. You have plenty of other likely investors with whom to seal the deal. Second, it gives you more leverage in negotiations. The more interest you have, the more favorable the terms of your final agreement will be.

Four ways AI streamlined our fundraising process

Aside from our seed round, which was a friends-and-family affair, we used AI for our fundraising efforts. My focus has always been: What can we automate? Obviously, the answer is not “everything.” Fundraising is still about building personal relationships. But I found four places where AI, specifically Bardeen, made a difference in our efforts.

Identifying strong prospects

AI automation can help you move past the stage of relying on one or two key connections in your fundraising. I used Bardeen to identify potential investors via Crunchbase.

It was fairly simple to set up. First, we compiled a list of companies like ours—AI agents—on Crunchbase. Their search feature made that part easy for Bardeen to navigate.

Once we had that list, we extracted investor information from each profile. Our thinking was that anyone who invested in a similar company might be interested in what Bardeen had to offer. Crunchbase gives you the names of a company’s investors and links to investor/firm profiles that have contact information, so this step was easy to automate as well.

I set Bardeen to the task and ended with a long contact list of prequalified investment leads.

Increasing outreach volume

Building personalized introduction emails takes a lot of time when you have a lot of prospects. But it’s important because a personalized message that shows you’re familiar with the recipient will be better received. Using the data from Crunchbase, Bardeen composed the initial email in a way that showed we were thoughtful about who we reached out to.

This is a step you want to test before putting into action to ensure you’re giving your AI agent the right prompts to build an effective email. Once a formula is down, you can easily 100x your email production rate.

Increasing investor engagement

A pitch deck that speaks the same language as an investor is a highly effective tool. AI helped us learn what our audience cared about so we could emphasize those aspects of Bardeen.

In that initial outreach email, we sent our pitch deck via DocSend. One of the great things about this platform is the detailed analytics it collects. DocSend tells you when someone opens your file, what pages of the deck they look at, and where they spend their time.

We had to look at that information manually, but it was worth the effort. If a lot of people are dropping off at a certain page, there’s something in your deck that’s not working. Whether that’s a diagram you need to re-design or messaging that’s misaligned with what your audience is expecting, you want to fix it.

We manually tracked engagement data and iterated on our messaging and positioning. Then, I had Bardeen automate a test—I thought of it as an A/B test, though the volume was small. Bardeen randomly chose one version, old or new, to send to each person on our list. We looked at which performed better to figure out, over time, the best way to pitch Bardeen.

Keeping us top-of-mind

Finding investors is a lead nurturing process. You’ll likely need multiple touchpoints with each individual before they decide to book a meeting. The goal is to ensure you’re following up at the right time.

Another part of the process was a collaboration between DocSend and Bardeen. Because DocSend notified us when each person opened our deck, we could use that email as a trigger. Bardeen sent out a follow-up email at that time asking for a meeting.

Reaching prospects when they’re already thinking about you makes your communications more effective. You’re on their mind, so they don’t have to switch mental modes to decide how to respond. So, we started that scheduling process when we were top-of-mind.

That doesn’t mean we got a 100% booking rate, but it was a strong signal in cases where our potential lead didn’t get back to us. Because they had just looked at our deck, we could assume that they understood what we did. If they didn’t want to move to the next step, we could remove them from our funnel. Even when you’re running things via automation, don’t spend resources or hang your hopes on a lead that isn’t going to pan out.

Where we didn’t use AI

Bardeen saved us a lot of time and enabled us to amp up our fundraising efforts, but it’s not the right solution for every problem you’ll face. I think of it as a tool you use for those repetitive, high-volume tasks that are little more than busy work. Send those to your AI and save time for the important things.

One thing I wouldn’t use AI for is our pitch deck. Your pitch deck is one of the most essential assets at any startup—it’s a high-impact presentation.

There’s a lot of hype around AI, but as a founder and CEO, you must be pragmatic about using these tools. We all know there’s a problem with reliability right now. So, generating pitch materials and sending them out without even looking at them is more likely to hurt your process than to help it.

AI is an amplifier

As AI continues to improve, more use cases will emerge to automate parts of building a company. At Bardeen, we’re tackling those with our new business agent. We’re also thinking about the reliability problem by making it easier to explain and debug the tool’s process. I’m excited by where this tech is going—I think it will be the next great equalizer.

At the same time, I’d caution against thinking AI will solve a problem for you. I think of it as an augment. It can make me a better, faster engineer or a better, faster founder. It enables me to spend my energy on that last mile—preparing for meetings, building relationships, and closing the deal. Any founder can get those benefits if they consider how AI can be used most effectively.

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