Raise Against What You Deliver.
Capital is committed once, then released tranche by tranche as an independent expert verifies each milestone. Your credibility score is how you qualify for that structure and how favourable the terms are.
Free to join · Single Expert Assessment from $180 · Blind Double from $450 · 5-day SLA
Pursuing DFSA Innovation Testing Licence · DIFC, Dubai
The rubric
What the Score Measures
Eight dimensions, published in advance, scored independently by two experts against the same published rubric.
Team
Founding experience, complementarity and commitment.
Market
Size, timing and the evidence behind the opportunity.
Product
Maturity, defensibility and technical substance.
Traction
Verified revenue, usage and retention signals.
Financials
Runway discipline, unit economics and reporting hygiene.
Scalability
Whether the model holds as volume grows.
Risk
Concentration, regulatory and execution exposure.
Fundability
Readiness for the round you are actually raising.
Deliverables
What You Get
Full Score Report
Dimension-by-dimension scoring with written expert commentary and the exact evidence cited.
Portable Score Link
One opt-in link you can share with any investor. You choose when it goes live.
Investor Matching
Matched on sector, stage, geography and check size, not on a paid placement.
Deal room
SAFE and note templates, milestone builder, document requests and e-signature.
Digital certificate
A verifiable certificate of your score and review date, anchored to your profile.
Plain money
What It Costs
No listing fees, no subscription, no carry. You pay for review, and you pay again only if the round closes.
Founder Pricing
- Create a profile
- Free
- Single Expert Assessment
- $180 to $1,800
- Blind Double Assessment
- $450 to $4,500
- Success fee on funded rounds
- 1%
- Listing or subscription fees
- None
Review price depends on stage and document depth. Quoted before you pay.
Honest Expectations
We launch Q4 2026 from DIFC, Dubai. Early founders get priority review slots at launch. We are pre-revenue and pre-licence, and we will not pretend otherwise.
These are illustrative examples with invented names, not real founders, investors, experts or programs. The directory opens at launch.
Illustrative examples
The Kind of Founders Who Will Raise Here
A preview of the profile format founders will publish once the directory opens. Every name below is invented.
Marcus Rivera
ChainPay
Blockchain-native payment rails
Raising
$1.2M
Priya Anand
DataBridge
Real-time data pipeline for enterprise
Raising
$800K
Lukas Weber
HealthStack
AI-powered diagnostic assistant
Raising
$400K
Adaeze Okonkwo
EduLearn
Personalized learning for Africa
Raising
$250K
Khalid Mansoor
RemitEase
MENA-to-Asia remittance corridor
Raising
$600K
Illustrative examples only. The directory opens at launch.
Founder Questions
Built Right for Founders
- Published 8-dimension rubric you can read before you pay
- Blind double-expert review with third-review arbitration
- 5-day review SLA on every commissioned review
- Opt-in, portable score link you switch on yourself
- SAFE and note templates in the deal room
- Milestone escrow so progress unlocks capital
- KYC for every participant on the platform
- Assessments from $180, 1% success fee, nothing hidden
Why Be First, When There Is No History Yet?
The first fifty founders get the blind double-expert review at cost, the success fee waived on their first funded round, and a recorded say in how the rubric is written. Refundable in full until the cohort closes.
See the Founding CohortThe Core Product
The Milestone Lifecycle, End to End
Define, fund, evidence, verify, release. Capital moves against verified progress or it does not move at all.
- 01
Define
Founder and investor
Both sides agree the tranches inside the deal room before any money moves: what each milestone is, what evidence will prove it, the deadline, and the amount that releases when it is proven.
- 02
Fund
Investor
The investor funds the full commitment once. Capital is held in an audited smart-contract escrow on an EVM-compatible network and is visible from the moment it lands. FounderGrade takes no spread and no interest on held capital.
- 03
Evidence
Founder
The founder submits the evidence agreed at definition: revenue exports, signed contracts, shipped releases, hiring records. Everything is timestamped and attached to the tranche.
- 04
Verify
Assigned expert
An independent expert checks the evidence against the definition and records a verification with written reasoning. This is the step that makes the release enforceable rather than discretionary.
- 05
Release
2-of-3 multisig
Founder, investor and expert each hold a key. Two signatures release the tranche. No single party can move funds, and unreleased capital stays in escrow.
When a Milestone Is Contested
Either side can dispute a verification. The tranche freezes, the evidence trail and the expert's written reasoning go to an independent reviewer who was not involved in the original verification, and nothing releases until the dispute resolves. If it resolves against the release, the unreleased tranche returns to the investor and we charge no fee on the refund.
Read the Escrow Integrity RulesWhere the Long-Term Advantage Comes From
Because verification sits at the exact point where an assessment meets an enforced capital release, the platform will accumulate a record of which assessments predicted which outcomes: which milestones were met, which were missed, and how that tracked the score that preceded them. Over time that is a dataset nobody scoring startups from the outside can reconstruct.
Roadmap, not a current capability. This dataset does not exist yet. We will publish the methodology before we publish any result from it.
Score Integrity
You Cannot Shop for a Better Score
Every completed assessment is recorded permanently, whatever it says. Founders decide which scores to reveal. They never decide whether an assessment shows up.
The Conflict Everyone Ignores
Conventional ratings are paid for by the thing being rated. That is the issuer-pays model, and it is what produced ratings inflation at the credit rating agencies. If the subject can also bury a poor result, every published score is good by construction and tells you nothing.
What a Founder Controls
A founder chooses which assessment scores to reveal. That is the only lever. A founder can never delete an assessment record, and can never hide that an assessment happened. The count, the date and the rubric version are permanent and public.
Why That Ends Score Shopping
Ordering assessments until one comes back flattering does not work when the ledger shows three completed and one shared. Non-disclosure becomes its own signal, so nobody has to be forced to publish a bad number for the number to mean something.
What an Investor Sees
3 Assessments Completed, 1 Shared, Most Recent March 2026
The value of a sealed assessment is never revealed, only that it exists and when it happened. Illustrative example of the ledger format.
And the Strongest Assessments Are Not Bought by the Founder
A programme-commissioned assessment is paid for by the accelerator, fund or programme rather than the company being assessed. That inverts the conflict rather than merely disclosing it, and it is why those assessments carry more weight in the ledger.
See How Assessments Are Priced
For founders
Make Your Next Round a Measured One.
Build your profile now and hold a priority review slot for launch.
Pursuing DFSA Innovation Testing Licence · DIFC, Dubai