Fundraising Intelligence Research
The Q2 Report: What Predicts a Meeting, and What Comes After
Two things separated founders before they hit send: whether the deck stated its own facts plainly, and whether the list was the right one. Decks that stated them plainly drew a 30 percent response against 7 percent for decks that left them to be inferred. A curated list more than doubled replies. Warm introductions helped early and gave no edge once a founder was in the room.
Scope: the 108 founders who ran tracked outreach through CherryPitch this quarter and reported outcomes. This is the outreach cohort, a subset of the platform, so counts are not comparable to prior reports.
A founder sends forty investor emails, hears back from fifteen, books eight calls, and moves into real conversations. Another founder sends the same forty and hears back from four. The gap between them was set before either one hit send, and it came down to two things CherryPitch measures: how clearly the deck stated what the company is, and whether the list was the right one.
This report covers the 108 founders who actively ran tracked outreach through CherryPitch during the quarter and reported what came back. That is the subset who reached the outreach stage, which is where response, meeting, and funding data actually exists.
We followed every outreach through the full funnel: response, meeting, and progress toward a round, tagging each one by how clearly the deck stated its facts, investor source, intro type, investor type, stage, and sector. Across 1,336 outreaches from those 108 founders, 22 percent got a reply and about half of those replies became meetings. By the end of the quarter, 10 of the 108 founders had reported progress toward a round, roughly one in eleven. Replies came fast when they came, a median near four days.
How we sorted the decks
Every deck asks an investor to infer something. Some ask for very little. We sorted each deck at the moment of outreach by how much was left to work out.
Stated plainly. What the company is, how far along it is, and what it is raising were all on the page. An investor could judge it on the merits.
Partly stated. The core was there, with at least one of those left for the reader to fill in.
Still unsettled. The story had not settled into a form an investor could act on.
This measures legibility, not effort, and it matters for a practical reason. Until a deck is clear, nobody can tell which investors actually fit it, and that includes the founder. A muddled deck could plausibly suit a dozen theses, so targeting turns into guesswork. Sending early costs more than a weak first impression. It means pitching before anyone can point the founder at the investors who would genuinely fit.
So the sequence the data rewards is straightforward. Get the deck to state its own facts. Let a clear deck reveal which investors it fits. Then reach out.
Clarity predicted every step of the funnel
Founders who reached out with a deck that stated its facts plainly got a response 30 percent of the time. Founders who reached out while the story was still unsettled got 7 percent. The middle group sat at 18 percent, which shows the effect is smooth. Each step toward a finished deck bought a measurable lift.
The pattern holds all the way down. The first group booked a meeting on 18 percent of outreaches. The third booked one on 1 percent. It tracked outcomes more tightly than any other variable in the study.
One honest caveat. Founders whose decks are clear tend to be further along in other ways too, with a tighter story and more traction behind it, so this reflects some of that broader momentum and not deck polish alone. It is still the earliest thing you can act on, and it is fully in your control before a single email goes out.
The funnel is where clarity compounds
A reply feels good. Real investor conversations shape the next eighteen months. Follow founders all the way to progress toward a round and the gap stops being a difference and becomes a different sport.
| Deck at outreach | Outreaches | Responses | Meetings | Founders with progress |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stated plainly | 675 | 200 (30%) | 122 (18%) | 9 |
| Partly stated | 375 | 67 (18%) | 28 (7%) | 1 |
| Still unsettled | 286 | 21 (7%) | 2 (1%) | 0 |
Read the last column. Of the 10 founders who reported progress toward a round, 9 did it with a deck that stated its facts plainly, and none while the story was still unsettled. That group was the origin of 90 percent of all the momentum in the study. The response advantage was more than three to one, and deeper in the funnel the gap only widened.
There is a mechanism underneath this. An investor opening a cold email has no idea how finished a deck is or who it was built for. They see a document and a reason it reached them. When a clear deck lands with an investor whose thesis actually fits, those two things line up and the response rate climbs. A clear deck also makes the targeting more accurate, because a legible deck can be matched to the investors it genuinely suits. Clarity and fit compound: the clearer the deck, the sharper the investor list, and the higher the response.
Who you pitch is the second lever, and it is a big one
Investor type barely moved the numbers. VCs, angel networks, and individual angels all replied at around 22 percent, so choosing a category of investor did almost nothing on its own. Fit did the work.
Outreach sent to a CherryPitch-curated list drew a 28 percent response. Outreach to a founder's self-sourced list drew 12 percent. Curated lists more than doubled replies and meetings, 15 percent against 6 percent. Since progress comes out of the bottom of the meeting funnel, more meetings from a fitted list meant more founders moving forward. Nobody can know for certain why a single investor says yes. What the data shows is a shift in probability: a deck pointed at the right investors gets read, answered, and taken to a meeting far more often. Curation means contacting the investors whose thesis, stage, and check size actually fit your company.
A warm intro gets you in the room and stops mattering there
Warm intros helped early. Among founders whose decks stated their facts plainly, a warm intro lifted response from 24 to 38 percent and meetings from 14 to 24 percent. That is real, and it is the part founders tend to overrate.
Watch the end of the funnel. Among that same group, the share of meetings that advanced toward a round was 7.7 percent after a warm introduction and 7.0 percent after a cold one. On this sample those are the same number. Once a founder was in the room, the introduction that got them there had no bearing on whether they moved forward. The deck did. A warm intro widens the top of your funnel. Clarity decides the bottom.
Personalization adds a smaller, real lift
Among founders whose decks were at least partly stated, personalized outreach drew 30 percent replies against 16 percent for generic sends. Worth the extra minutes, and worth less than getting the deck clear and the list fitted first.
Finish first, then target, then reach out
Three moves come out of the data. Finish the deck before you start, because a clear deck outperformed an unfinished one at every step and by the widest margin at the end of the funnel. Pitch a curated, well-fit list rather than the biggest list you can assemble, because fit more than doubled replies and meetings. Use your warm intros to widen the top of the funnel and lean on the deck to carry the bottom, since warmth stopped predicting progress the moment the meeting started.
The order matters. A clear deck is what makes accurate targeting possible in the first place, so finishing it comes first, and the right investor list follows from it. Skip that step and the list you build, however long, is aimed at investors your deck cannot clearly speak to yet.
The two levers CherryPitch was built for
The two levers that decided this quarter are the two things CherryPitch was built to give you. It curates the investors whose thesis, stage, and history fit what your company actually is, each match carrying the reasoning behind it. Reading the deck is how it knows who you are. Point a finished deck at the right room. Don't pitch everyone. CherryPitch.
What we're studying next
Next quarter we turn to the investor side: how often a fund's stated focus differs from where its recent checks actually went, and what that gap costs a founder working from the stated version. We're building that dataset now. Findings publish in October 2026.
How this data was collected
1,336 outreach actions from the 108 founders who ran tracked outreach through CherryPitch between April 1 and June 30, 2026. This cohort is a subset of platform users, the founders who reached the outreach stage and reported outcomes, and is not comparable to deck-analysis counts from prior reports. Deck condition reflects the state of the deck at the time of each outreach. Investor source marks whether the list was CherryPitch-curated or self-sourced. Response and meeting figures are the share of outreach that advanced. Progress toward a round is counted once per founder and attributed to the deck condition of the outreach that reached it. Outcomes are self-reported and platform-tracked. Percentages are rounded.