First Round Capital’s Dorm Room Fund just released VCWiz, a tool to help founders find investors and raise money from them.
The platform is one part VC directory and one part CRM tool, essentially letting you find the best investors for your startup then begin the process of reaching out to them.
New users input some basic information about their startup including a description, industry and preferred location of investors. This data is used to recommend some initial firms, but of course you can browse and find your own too.
Founders can see all of a firm’s recent investments, common co-investors, preferred industries, deals to date and even background information on all the firm’s partners. You can also see reviews of each investor that were written anonymously by founders and provided by VC review tool Know Your VC.
The CRM aspect lets you add flag investors and move them from stage to stage of fundraising – like “in talks”, passed or committed. There’s also an option to connect the tool to your Gmail inbox or BCC the tool your emails so you can pull in emails with investors and track them all in one place.
If requested VCWiz can also send an introduction email to the partner on your behalf if you don’t know anyone who can introduce you. Rei Wang, Director of Dorm Room Fund explained that connecting first-time founders without their own connections to the right investors was originally one of the main reasons the firm set out to build this tool.
The tool pulls in its information from a variety of sources including Crunchbase, Twitter and others. It also uses basic machine learning to recommend investors depending on your bio and preferred industries. The tool was built by Dorm Room Fund’s Yasyf Mohamedali as part of his master’s thesis at MIT.