Founder Reference Back-Channel
Before an investment decision, your agent searches LinkedIn for mutual connections to the founder, drafts personalized outreach emails for back-channel references, and queues them in your Gmail drafts. What used to take 2-3 hours of manual LinkedIn searching and email writing happens in 30 seconds.
Back-channel references are the best signal you have. You're skipping them because they take too long.
You need to find people who've actually worked with the founder, write personalized outreach that doesn't read like a form letter, and do it fast enough that it doesn't stall your deal timeline. Most partners skip thorough referencing on early-stage deals because the manual work takes 2-3 hours per founder.
According to First Round Capital's research, reference checks that surface red flags save an average of $2M+ in avoided bad investments. The signal is there — the bottleneck is the time it takes to collect it.
Give it a name. It maps the entire reference network in seconds.
Give it the founder's name and company. The agent searches LinkedIn for mutual connections — 1st and 2nd degree — plus former colleagues, board members, and investors from previous companies. It cross-references your firm's CRM for existing relationships you might not remember.
Out of dozens of potential paths, it identifies the 5-8 strongest reference connections — ranked by relationship depth and your proximity to them.
Not "can you tell me about John." Real outreach that gets responses.
For each reference, you get the person's name, their relationship to the founder, your connection path to them, and a drafted outreach email that's actually personalized. The kind that references specific context — their shared history, the right ask, and a clear time commitment.
Instead of "hey, can you tell me about Sarah" — you get "I saw you were CTO at Acme when Sarah was VP Eng. We're evaluating her new company for a Series A and I'd value 15 minutes of your perspective on her technical leadership."
30 seconds after you request it. Full reference cycle compressed to same-day.
Drafts land in your Gmail within 30 seconds. You review each one, make any edits, and hit send. Schedule five 15-minute reference calls for the same week. What used to stretch across 2-3 days now happens before your next meeting.
No more skipping references on early-stage deals because the work doesn't fit your timeline. Every deal gets the diligence it deserves — without the time tax.