You have pitched to an investor. They seem interested, and they’ve asked for more data to back up what you’ve shared in your pitch deck. 

This is a make-or-break moment. Founders must be able to speak confidently on their company’s numbers. That means knowing your numbers now, and having good, sensible models for forecasting future growth. 

You can commit that data and those models to memory, but what if an investor needs to reference them later? 

This information should be housed in a data room, where investors can access all of the information needed to make a decision about your company’s potential to scale. Although it may seem obvious, relevant data points are all too often missing, so too is a data room. 

Get Investor Ready

What is a Data Room? 

In the broadest sense it offers: 

• A summary of the information you’ve gathered throughout your fundraise process.
• A secure place to store and share your company’s sensitive financial data, and any necessary compliance records.
• A single source of truth for the data-heavy documents you might be revising and updating during a long raise.

The data room is typically stored and shared with a secure cloud service. It gives you an opportunity, outside the constraints of the pitch meeting, to show a firm grasp on the numbers that are going to drive your future success. It also makes due diligence easier for the investor: in this one location they should have all the records and documents they need to tick their compliance boxes. 

Read on to find out more on what you need to build out your own data room, and some of the common mistakes we see that can make a dent in startups’ crucial early-stage raises.