The Earlier Handshake: Investors Are Meeting Founders Before the Deck. Be Known Before You Ask.

Known Before the Deck: investors are meeting founders before the pitch, graphic with Ken McArthur

The earliest stage of venture is more crowded than it has ever been on PitchBook’s count, and some investors are responding by meeting founders before the deck, sometimes before the company exists. Here’s what the numbers show, one investor’s own account of backing a founder before the idea, and what founders and first-time fund managers can do to be known before they ask.

This post covers relationships and process. It isn’t legal, tax, or investment advice.

The Earliest Rounds Are Crowded

The Q3 2026 PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor estimates that US startups completed 8,625 first-time VC financings worth $34.3 billion through September 30. That’s already above 2021’s full-year record of 8,507, with one quarter still to count, so it’s an estimate that will move. The report says AI is “lowering barriers to entry and driving a rise in new company formation,” which “has only intensified competition for the funding available.”

PitchBook’s October 18 article adds two more points:

  • Prices: the median pre-money valuation for a US pre-seed deal has tripled to $12 million from $4 million in 2020, and the typical seed deal’s pre-money is now $19.5 million.
  • Fewer investors: the number of active VCs “has been declining for years.” PitchBook doesn’t give a number, so I won’t either.

A Second Measure, Kept Separate

Carta measures something different: pre-seed SAFEs and convertible notes among startups that use Carta. In Q2 2026, those startups raised $3.19 billion across more than 11,500 instruments, compared with $3.22 billion across 14,825 a year earlier. The average instrument was $276,000, up 27% year over year and a record in Carta’s data.

These figures aren’t comparable with PitchBook’s. One counts rounds across the market; the other counts instruments among one company’s customers. Carta’s Q2 numbers are also preliminary and will be revised upward. But read on their own terms, they say the same thing: roughly the same pre-seed money, spread across fewer, larger checks.

Investors Are Moving Earlier

PitchBook’s article came out of conversations at TechCrunch Disrupt, and it describes what some smaller firms are doing about the squeeze. These are the investors’ own views, from one article.

  • Asymmetric Capital Partners: founder Rob Biederman said dealmaking has “gotten almost comically competitive.”
  • Base10: for principal Danielle London, PitchBook wrote, competition for a deal “now starts before a company exists.” She’s pursuing academics spinning out research, many of whom “didn’t know that they wanted to be founders.” Base10 is also weighing uncapped SAFEs and different check sizes to get into early rounds.
  • Brightmind Partners: founder Stephen Ward incubates companies alongside founders before they raise, for free.

Then there’s Pear VC, which announced a $333 million Fund V on October 14. Pear says most of it will go to new pre-seed and seed investments over about two and a half years, taking its assets under management above $1.1 billion. WSJ Pro reported the fund is about $100 million smaller than Pear’s 2023 fund. Pear says it sees “thousands of opportunities every year” and runs PearX, university programs, hackathons, founder communities, and two studios to be “close to the moment when an idea becomes a company.”

Case Study: Andera, Backed Before the Idea

Pear’s partner Shravan Reddy told this story on the firm’s site in July. It’s the investor’s own account of its own win, so treat it as one example, not evidence.

In April 2024, Pear invested at pre-seed in Aryo Patel, an MIT dropout with “no cofounder and no product.” His idea was RegCheck, software to help compliance officers at banks keep up with regulatory changes. He interviewed compliance officers and confirmed the pain, but he couldn’t get meetings with the bank buyers “who could actually say yes,” and the pain turned out not to be acute enough. So he killed his own idea.

He pivoted to SOX compliance testing and, in Reddy’s words, used brute force: about 4,000 cold emails a week, until he’d reached 250 discovery calls with CFOs and finance VPs. Pear’s talent team kept introducing cofounder candidates. He met a dozen before choosing Tinah Hong, a friend since grade school. Pear invested again at seed, and on July 20, 2026, the company, now called Andera, announced a $37 million Series A led by Lightspeed, with Pear participating.

Two honest notes. Aryo’s customer meetings came from cold volume, not warm introductions, and that worked for discovery calls. And this is a Series A, not an exit, from a founder who went through Pear’s own accelerator, which isn’t a typical path.

What the story shows is what an early investor says it was underwriting: “The company’s name changed. The idea changed. The person we invested in didn’t.”

The Fund Side: Pear’s Own Origin Story

Pear’s Fund V announcement also tells how the firm started. Its founders say they began 13 years ago at Coupa Café in Palo Alto, and met founders through “coffee shops, dorm rooms, small offices, friends’ introductions.” They say their first LPs “believed in the two of us before Pear had a track record.”

Pear is now a 13-year-old firm with more than $1.1 billion under management, not an emerging manager, and that’s its own telling. The announcement doesn’t say who its LPs are, how long the raise took, or how it was sourced. I wouldn’t treat it as a template. But the early part of the story will sound familiar to any first-time GP: the relationships came before the track record.

What Founders Can Do Now

  1. Start before you need the check. If you’re raising in the next few months, spend this week on investors who already know you or your work. Send a short update and a specific ask, not a cold blast. Don’t claim any investor is waiting for you.
  2. Show your reasoning. An honest update that says what you tested, what you learned, and what you changed gives an early investor something to remember besides the deck. Don’t invent progress.
  3. Know your SAFE terms. Carta says 93% of Q2 2026 pre-seed rounds were SAFEs and 91% of SAFEs were post-money, and caps on larger SAFEs rose 40% year over year. Know your cap and what stacked SAFEs mean for your ownership before a first call, and check with your own counsel.
  4. Ask who knows whom. For each investor you want to meet, ask who already knows you and also knows them.
  5. Model, test, adjust. Track which updates get replies and which conversations lead to a second one, and adjust what you send.

What GPs Can Do Now

  1. Find the people who meet founders first. Think about who in your network meets people before they start companies: professors, operators who’ve left large companies, accelerator staff. Make it easy for them to send you someone.
  2. Think about what your structure signals. PitchBook says Base10 is weighing larger checks, smaller ownership targets, and uncapped SAFEs, and notes the risk: you won’t know your ownership or valuation until a later priced round. If your fund’s thesis is getting in early, be ready to explain how you’ll protect ownership and reserves.
  3. Build a reputation founders will defend. PitchBook reports that when other firms tried to squeeze Brightmind out of rounds, founders pushed back on its behalf. That kind of reputation is built long before you need it.

Be Known Before You Ask

When the earliest rounds are crowded, the first meeting is the scarce thing, and some investors are going earlier to get it. A warm introduction is one way to be known before the deck: someone who already knows you tells the investor why the conversation is worth having. There’s no data I know of on how often that leads to a check at pre-seed, so I won’t claim it does. It changes how the first conversation starts.

ConnectLab.live is a relationship discovery platform. It doesn’t predict who will fund a company and gives no financial advice. It shows warm paths alongside your own connections, so you can see who in your network sits close to the investors who fit your raise.

Connection is the currency of the 21st Century.

Who already knows you, and also knows the investor you want to meet?

Sources

About Ken McArthur

Ken McArthur is the founder of ConnectLab.live, an AI relationship-intelligence and warm-intro platform that helps founders who are raising find the funds that fit and the people who can introduce them, and helps fund managers connect with the founders they back. He was recently accepted into Harvard Business School Foundry. He also writes Raise Smarter, a daily newsletter on what's really moving in early-stage fundraising. Ken challenges us to realize we ALL have an impact, whether we want to or not, on thousands of people we touch in our day-to-day lives, and he shows that simple things make a HUGE difference. ConnectLab.live grew out of that belief. Connection is the currency of the 21st Century, and the right introduction can change a company's future. Long before ConnectLab, Ken was the popular host of live events that brought together top-level marketers, entrepreneurs, business owners, corporations and non-profit organizations to build multi-million dollar joint venture relationships. He has managed product launches ranked in the top 400 sites on the Internet and is regularly asked to speak at leading marketing events. He created AffiliateShowcase.com, a pioneering affiliate program search engine and directory. He also founded the MBS Internet Research Center, which conducted the world's largest survey ever attempted on creating and launching successful information products. Ken was the official mentor for Sterling Valentine as he took his launch from zero to over $100,000 in less than 8 days, a proof of concept documented in Info Product Blueprint. Today he puts that same skill for connecting people and launching ideas to work for founders and the investors who back them.

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