To better understand our approach to Sunlight and Startup 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 company's profile, you're ready to find investors and start pitching. Here's how it works:

With Sunlight startup profiles, that first pitch to investors is a thing of the past. Gone is the inconsistency of the process: short email to whet their appetite, long email to avoid endless back-and-forth, short pitch deck to tease your startup, long pitch deck to show you mean business, long-form memo to sell your 100 year vision, get creative with a video... the list goes on.

This lack of consistency and clear guidance for how best to pitch a VC for the first time is infuriating. And not only is it a nightmare for founders, it's a nightmare for investors too.

Sunlight startup profiles remove this inconsistency and streamline the fundraising process by bringing everything an investor needs to know about your startup together in one place. And the beauty is, once you are on Sunlight, investors can find your company and even pitch you! No more wasted time crafting individual pitches, no more wondering if the VC read your email: simply create your profile and get back to what's important... building your company.

Here are some of the features your Sunlight startup profile will include*:

• Company Overview — Share your company's mission, the problem it is solving and your solution; upload videos and images to showcase your 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 — Create detailed product walkthroughs, notify your network about new product updates and receive immediate feedback from the Sunlight community
• Funding — Let investors know when you are raising capital, create a fundraising timeline detailing previous rounds and showcase existing investors by linking to their Sunlight profiles
• Financials and Growth Metrics — Create beautifully designed visuals for all your key metrics
• 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 VCs on request.
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** Sunlight startup profiles are created and managed by startup team members called admins. There is no limit to the number of admins your startup can have.

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 (no web crawlers, actual people!), it has never been easier to find investors.

On Sunlight, you can search for investors based on their:

• Investment Criteria — Sector, location, stage, average investment size and more
• Portfolio — Want to pitch a specific company's investors? No problem!
• Team — Find investors based on their team's employment history, education and more
• Reviews — Filter investors based on their founder review scores
• Fund Vintage — Where are they in their fund's lifecycle?
• LPs — Who are the venture capital firm's investors?
• Diversity Data — To learn more about diversity data disclosure, please visit The Rules

...and much, much more.

Sunlight investor profiles are designed to contain everything you need to know about a venture capital firm in a consistent, easy-to-navigate format and save you time on due diligence (and potentially lots of future pain) by featuring verified reviews from named, not anonymous, founders.

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

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

1. Watchlist
Mark Suster put it best with his infamous lines, not dots blog post: whether you're actively raising capital or not, it's never too early to start building relationships with investors.

By using Sunlight's one-click Watchlist feature, you will alert the venture capital firm to your startup's presence and, once they have reviewed your profile, they will Accept or Decline your request to be added to their Watchlist (either way, you will receive a response: the days of VCs ghosting you are over).

If your Watchlist request is accepted, additional messaging features will be unlocked and the venture capital firm will be subscribed to your monthly Investor Update, significantly increasing your chance of success when you...

2. Pitch
By using Sunlight's one-click Pitch feature, you will automatically unlock any previously private sections of your profile for the investor during the review period. Once the VC has reviewed your profile, they will Accept or Decline your request (if declined, previous privacy settings will be restored).

If the venture capital firm accepts your pitch, Sunlight's full suite of messaging services will be unlocked and you will be invited to a formal (in-person or virtual) pitch meeting with the investor.

*Before pitching, please be sure to read The Rules. And to learn more about how venture capital firms can pitch you, please read Section 3 of the For Investors page.
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Whether you're creating your profile, building a target list of investors or pitching, 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 doing what's important... building your startup.

The main goal of Sunlight's community features is to reduce informational asymmetry and enable any startup, founder or team member, 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.