Gatekeep

Quick disclaimer: most of you are bootstrapping and shouldn't raise. This post is for

the minority who've already decided to, and are currently getting silence. Skip if that's not you.

The problem I built for: Founder discovery and Quality dealsourcing for investors.

You send 60 emails, get 4 replies, 1 call, then nothing.

You have no idea if the deck is bad, the market's wrong, or you caught someone on a bad Tuesday.

So you iterate on nothing, because you learned nothing. Every founder I know has a spreadsheet full of "no response" and zero information.

What I built: you pick an investor, pitch their AI persona for 30 minutes, get scored across 12 dimensions. The persona doesn't interrupt — it lets you finish, then comes back to everything you dodged, which is somehow worse.

The part that makes it not a toy: the run gets delivered to the real investor.

Clear their bar and you land in their hand-off queue with your transcript and contact details. Miss it and you still show up in their dashboard — who pitched, how they scored, where they fell short — so they can pull you out anyway if something catches.

I'm being upfront about the roster because you'll check anyway. Some investors have claimed their profile: they wrote their own thesis and set their own bar for when a founder gets surfaced to them. The rest are personas built from public material — thesis, portfolio, talks, writing — labelled as AI on the page, and any investor can have theirs taken down the same day. Coverage is strongest in AI and tech, decent across North America and Asia-Pacific, pre-seed to Series B+. Thin everywhere else.

I'd rather tell you that now than have you find out 30 minutes into a pitch.

The distribution thing, since this is IH and that's what we actually talk about:

I spent $0 on ads. What happened is an investor screenshotted the landing page and posted it, and that did 4.5M views in launch week. I've thought a lot about why, and the honest answer is that the page was uncomfortable to look at. It put a thing people

feel privately — that funding is gated by who you already know — on a page with names on it. People shared it to argue about it. I didn't engineer that and I'm not sure I could do it twice.

Where it's at: 30+ founders have pitched, free access for students at 18+ universities, Solo, building from Taipei.

If you're raising and you've been getting silence: gatekeep.vc

Happy to answer anything about the distribution side in the comments, including the parts that didn't work.