Pitch decks lie. Diligence is slow. Capital walks away. We built FounderGrade to fix this.
For decades the pitch deck has been the dominant artifact of fundraising. Twelve slides, polished and rehearsed, carrying the whole weight of a decision about capital.
A deck compresses a complex business into a narrative, and narratives are easy to shape. Every early-stage investor knows the gap between what a deck asserts and what can be verified, and every founder knows how much of a raise is spent closing that gap one conversation at a time.
Credibility as Infrastructure
Consumer credit works because a shared, portable record exists. A borrower does not re-prove their history to every lender. Startups have no equivalent. Each investor rebuilds the same picture from scratch, and the founder pays for it in weeks.
FounderGrade is built on one thesis: credibility can be measured against a published rubric, and once measured it should be portable. A score that a founder carries into every conversation is worth more than a deck rewritten for each one.
Pitch decks lie. Diligence is slow. Capital walks away. We built FounderGrade to fix this.
What We Are Building
- Eight scored dimensions: team, market, product, traction, financials, scalability, risk and fundability
- Two independent experts per review, blind to founder identity, with a third only when they materially disagree
- A score that moves as milestones are delivered or missed, not a one-time snapshot
- On-chain milestone escrow so capital tracks delivery instead of signature
What This Is Not
This is not a replacement for judgment. A score is a shared starting point, so the diligence that follows can go to nuance rather than basic verification. Investors still decide. Founders still build.
We are pre-launch. Everything published here describes the system we are building and the rubric we will hold ourselves to, not results we have not yet earned.
