Fundraising
Raise without re-briefing every meeting.
A round runs across weeks of calls with different investors, at different stages, each needing the same update: where things stand, what changed since they last checked in. You work that out with your assistant call by call. What’s hard is having it in front of you the next time, instead of reconstructing it before you dial in.
Why a round is hard to hold in your head
Each investor conversation moves something — a termsheet arrives, a valuation range narrows, a question gets answered. None of that is one long thread; it’s a dozen separate calls and a handful of documents, spread across whatever tool you happened to be using that day.
By the time you’re prepping for the next call, the state of the round — who’s actually leading, what’s still open, what changed last week — is scattered exactly where you can’t quickly get at it, and a fundraise is the worst place to sound uncertain about your own numbers.
What Giraffe does instead
You keep raising the way you already do. After a call that moves something, you say so — “Save what changed to the Series B project — the new termsheet.” — and it lands sorted: where things stand now, what you’ve decided, what’s still open.
Before the next call, you open that one project and read it. No reconstructing the round from memory or from a scroll through old messages.
What that looks like
Say you’re three termsheets in, narrowing on a lead, targeting a close this quarter. Here’s the project you’d open before the next investor call:
Series B — data room
- Current
- Decisions
- Prioritize the faster diligence timeline over the higher headline valuation.
- Data room stays to the six documents finance actually asked for — nothing speculative added.
- Open questions
- Does the board want a say before the term sheet is signed, or after?
- Notes
- One of the three termsheets carries a board seat; the other two don't.
- Recent changes
That’s the round in a glance: where it stands, what you’ve already decided, and the one question still open — with the date on each line and whether it was you or an assistant who moved it. You don’t re-derive any of it before you pick up the phone.
Most calls, reading the project first is enough. When you want help on what comes next — a follow-up note, a comparison of terms — you can pick it up in ChatGPT or Claude with the whole round already in front of it, which is exactly how Giraffe works.
Never walk into a call not knowing where the round stands.