Investor research without Crunchbase, the free toolkit

Most founders raising pre-seed do not need Crunchbase Pro. The $999/year subscription is built for VCs sourcing deal flow, not founders sourcing capital. The data founders actually need is in five free places. Here is how to use them.

The 5 sources, in order

You will spend ~4 hours total. Order matters because each source builds on the last.

1. Signal NFX — fund mandate per partner (free, 30 minutes)

signal.nfx.com. Database of 20,000+ VC partners with stage focus, check size, and recent activity. Free tier gives you everything you need.

Use it to:

• Filter by stage (pre-seed, seed)
• Filter by vertical
• See partner names, fund, and last 90 days of public activity

Output: a starting list of 80-120 partners, with names attached.

The flaw of Crunchbase: it shows funds. It does not show the specific partner at that fund who would back you. Signal NFX does. The partner name is the most valuable single data point in your research.

2. Twitter / X advanced search — what they actually invest in (free, 60 minutes)

twitter.com/search-advanced. Fund partners post their thesis publicly more than any other channel. Most pre-seed partners tweet their recent deals within 7 days of close.

For each of the 80-120 partners from step 1, search:

from:[partner_handle] (invested OR backed OR led OR seed OR pre-seed)

This surfaces their actual recent deals in their own words. You can:

• Drop partners who haven't posted in 90+ days (they are likely between funds or moved roles)
• Tag partners by vertical based on their last 5 deals
• Capture quotes you can reference in cold emails

Output: list narrowed to ~50, each with 1-2 recent-deal references.

3. LinkedIn fund-page Activity tab (free, 45 minutes)

For each fund in your list, visit their LinkedIn page → Activity tab. You will see:

• Which posts the fund itself amplified (signal: what their public marketing positions them as caring about)
• Which partners are most active (the ones replying to founder posts and announcing deals)
• Which portfolio companies they spotlight (signal: what they want their next deal to look like)

This is where you decide which partner at the fund to email. The active partner matters more than the brand-name partner. Often these are different people.

Output: every fund in your list now has a SPECIFIC partner attached, not "info@thefund.com".

4. Their own portfolio page (free, 45 minutes)

Every fund has a portfolio page. Most founders skim it for 10 seconds. Spend 5 minutes per fund instead.

For each fund, look for:

• The 3-5 portcos most similar to your company (vertical, stage, business model)
• Whether the fund led or co-invested in those rounds (a "led pre-seed" signal is much stronger than "participated in a seed round")
• The 1-2 portcos that look the most like your direct competitor (you need to know if the fund has a competing investment that could block them)

A fund with 2 directly competitive portcos in your space is a no. They cannot do you. Cut them now, before the cold email.

Output: list narrowed to ~30, each fund tagged "good fit" or "blocked by competition".

5. Their fund's own blog or Substack (free, 30 minutes)

Most pre-seed funds publish thesis content. Read the most recent 3 posts from each fund in your final list. You will find:

• The exact language the fund uses to describe what they back (use this language verbatim in your cold email)
• The current internal narrative (e.g., "we're betting on agents in 2026") that you can reference in your subject line
• Any "we are not investing in X" disclosures (saves you from pitching companies they have publicly said no to)

Output: 1-2 specific quotes per fund that go directly into your cold email.

The data fields that actually matter

Crunchbase will give you 50+ fields per investor. You only need 8:

1. Fund name
2. Active partner name (NOT "managing partner of the firm" if they have not led a deal in 6 months)
3. Last 3 deals (with dates and one-line description)
4. Stage focus (pre-seed, seed, A; ignore funds that say "all stages")
5. Vertical fit (their last 3 deals' verticals)
6. Check size range (from their public thesis or recent deals)
7. Geography (US, EU, UK, APAC)
8. One quote you'll reference (from their public writing)

That's it. Anything beyond these 8 fields is research drag.

What this looks like as a worksheet

Build a Google Sheet with these 8 columns. One row per fund. Fill it in as you work through the 5 sources.

When you are done, sort by:

1. Stage match (drop anything that's not your stage)
2. Vertical match (your top 30)
3. Recent deal recency (most recent first)

Email the top 30. That is your week-1 send batch.

The ROI math vs Crunchbase Pro

Crunchbase Pro: $999/year, 30 minutes to find a fund, but the partner attribution is shallow and the recent-deal context is missing.

This 5-step toolkit: $0, 4 hours total, gives you the partner name + recent deals + thesis quote per fund. Ready-to-send cold-email reference text per investor.

The only thing Crunchbase has that this doesn't: the visualizations and the fund-of-fund relationship graph. If you do not need those (you don't, for pre-seed), skip it.

Where Claude Fundraiser fits

We built the matching engine to do steps 1-5 automatically when you upload your deck. The platform queries the same public sources, ranks the 8,665 funds in our enriched DB by fit to your specific deck, and surfaces the 30 most likely to reply with the recent-deal reference text already populated.

But you do not need us to do this. You can build the target list yourself with 4 hours of work. The data is all public; the engineering is just the time-saver.

If you do it manually, two final tips:

• Save the Google Sheet. The same 30 names will be your target list for the seed round 12 months from now, possibly with the same active partners.
• Update the "last deal" column monthly. Funds that go silent for 90+ days are usually between vintages and will not deploy until the next fund closes.