To better understand our approach to Sunlight and Investor profiles, please read The Diversity Problem. Before joining our Waitlist, please be sure to read The Rules and get ready to do the DIP.
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Sunlight is rebuilding the venture capital fundraising process, with diversity, equity and inclusion put first.

At its core, Sunlight is a searchable database of venture capital firm and startup profiles. Once you have created your fund's profile, you're ready to find startups and pitch. Here's how it works:

Don't get us wrong, we love your websites. Some of them are great, some of them... not so much. But for startups, the decentralisation of VC data is an absolute nightmare.

For most founders raising venture capital for the first time, their journey begins with a Google search. This might lead to a few helpful blog posts, the odd VC website or the limited data and cold design of Crunchbase's free tier, but no killer repository.

Let's assume they get lucky and find a list of investors who are currently deploying capital in their sector and location… now the fun begins. Spreadsheet at the ready, the founder visits each individual website, navigates the labyrinthine user interface and finally lands on the team page. No emails, aaahhhh!!!!

To highlight the scale of this problem, let's look at Y Combinator. On average, startups backed by YC need 30 meetings to get to one term sheet. And they're the lucky ones, investors come to them. The average startup will need to target 100s of VCs to even get close to 30 meetings.

That's a lot of time spent searching for VCs, hunting down contact details and writing personalised emails. Time better spent running their company.

With Sunlight, those days are over. By creating a central repository of actively-managed VC profiles, it has never been easier for startups to find investors.

Built in collaboration with startups ranging from pre-funding to Series C+, Sunlight investor profiles are designed to include everything a startup would want to know about your fund*:

• Investment Criteria — This is the most important data point for startups, and often the most difficult to find. Let startups know what sector, location, stage and more you invest in
• Team — Each team member will have their own Sunlight profile** to showcase their experience (work, education, side-hustle, writing), outline their key responsibilities and save references
• Portfolio — Showcase your portfolio companies and link to their Sunlight profiles
• Mission — What is your mission, what makes you different from other funds?
• Resources — Sector research, investor memos, founder interviews, blog posts, videos etc
• Reviews — Verified founder reviews, based on proven interaction (pitch, investment)
• Diversity Data — To learn more about diversity data disclosure, please visit The Rules

...and much, much more.

*With Sunlight's advanced privacy settings, you will be able to hide sensitive information and grant individual access to startups on request.

** Sunlight investor profiles are created and managed by venture capital firm team members called admins. There is no limit to the number of admins your venture capital firm can have.

Bonus: Use your custom Diversity Data Dashboard to measure the effectiveness of your fund's inclusivity initiatives and the messaging on your Sunlight investor profile. Data will include gender, ethnicity (and a wide array of other diversity categories) breakdown for the following metrics: profile page views, number of inbound Watchlist & Pitch requests (see 3. below), followers and much more.

No more email pitches, no more back-and-forth requesting more information... Sunlight startup profiles are designed to include everything an investor would want to know about a startup:

• Company Overview — The startup's mission, the problem they are solving and their solution; explore videos and images showcasing the company, team, customer testimonials and more
• Team — Each team member will have their own Sunlight profile to showcase their experience (work, education, side-hustle, writing), outline their key responsibilities and save references
• Product — Detailed product walkthroughs, receive notifications about new product updates and provide immediate feedback with Sunlight's community features and messaging services
• Funding — Receive notifications when startups are raising capital, view their fundraising timeline detailing previous rounds and visit the Sunlight profiles of existing investors
• Financials and Growth Metrics — View beautifully designed visuals for all the startup's key metrics
• Diversity Data — To learn more about diversity data disclosure, please visit The Rules

...and much, much more.

By creating a global repository of actively-managed startup profiles (no web crawlers, actual people!), it has never been easier for investors to find startups. On Sunlight, you can search for startups by location, sector, stage, financial and growth metrics, similar companies, team size, diversity data and more.

Once you've found a startup that you think would be a good fit for your fund, simply add them to your Startup Watchlist or, if you're ready to take the next step, click Pitch.

On Sunlight, there are two ways to pitch startups*:

1. Watchlist
Mark Suster's infamous lines, not dots blog post works both ways: whether you're ready to deploy capital or not, it's never too early to start building relationships with startups.

By using Sunlight's one-click Watchlist feature, you will alert the startup to your venture capital firm's presence and, once they have reviewed your profile, they will Accept or Decline your request to be added to your Watchlist.

If your Watchlist request is accepted, additional messaging features will be unlocked and you will be subscribed to their monthly Investor Update.

Sunlight Watchlists are a simple, efficient way to monitor startups over time and help you develop a relationship with the startup until you're ready to take things to the next level...

2. Pitch
Sunlight's one-click Pitch feature sends the startup a pitch request, indicating that your venture capital firm would like to arrange a formal (in-person or virtual) pitch meeting.

If the startup accepts your pitch request, Sunlight's full suite of messaging services — and any previously private sections of the startup's profile — will be unlocked and you will be able to communicate with the startup directly.

*Before pitching, please be sure to read The Rules. And to learn more about how startups can pitch you, please read Section 3 of the For Startups page.‍

Whether you're creating your fund's profile, researching startups or reviewing pitches, Sunlight will be with you every step of the way. Let us take care of the hard stuff for you, so you can get back to what's important... tweeting supporting your portfolio companies and finding your next unicorn.

The main goal of Sunlight's community features is to reduce informational asymmetry and enable any venture capital firm or investor, no matter their background, to have a voice and build a network.

Social products are hard, messy and prone to all kinds of unintentional flaws, so we plan to roll this out carefully and slowly. But we strongly believe there needs to be a dedicated social network for startups and investors to help solve the Closed Networks problem and we will do our best to not let you down.

Sunlight Social (yeah, we don't have a name for it yet) will allow startups, venture capital firms, founders, investors and team members to share long-form writing, images, videos and a bunch of unique content designed specifically for the VC-Startup ecosystem.

Think of it like Twitter without all the politics and humble brags (wish us luck with the latter), Facebook without that feeling of self-loathing and LinkedIn without the Stories (WTF?!).

If you have any suggestions for features to include or (more importantly) avoid, we'd love to hear from you. Please feel free to drop us an email or, since we're being social, DM us on Twitter.