Good sourcing starts with usable investment criteria
An investment thesis document is not yet a sourcing specification. A living pipeline requires criteria expressed as observable filters, preferences, signals, and exclusions.
Europe is fragmented across languages, registries, programs, funding ecosystems, and disclosure practices. Provenance is therefore at least as important as reach.
1. Separate hard filters from soft preferences
Hard filters are criteria that make a company non-investable for you, such as stage, ticket, geography, or a legal exclusion. Soft preferences change relevance without automatically removing the company.
- Sector and technology
- Stage, company age, and funding status
- Geography and legal presence
- Ticket, ownership, and reserve logic
- Team or business-model preferences
- Explicit exclusions and conflicts
2. Prioritize signals by decision value
Funding, formation, hiring, product, customer, grant, accelerator, research, event, and community signals can all matter. Their importance depends on your criteria and the source reliability.
A signal should carry three facts: what happened, when, and according to which source. Only then should the pipeline explain why the event might matter to the investor.
3. Treat source and freshness as part of the result
Sourcing results lose value quickly when source, timestamp, and conflicts are missing. Keep public, licensed, submitted, and approved information distinct.
OECD data shows strong regional and deal-size concentration in AI venture capital. Market reports like this provide context; they do not replace company-level sources or a review against the investor's criteria.
4. Solve identity and deduplication before automation
One company can appear under multiple domains, spellings, former names, or program listings. The pipeline needs a stable external record ID and inspectable merge rules before save, pass, and evaluation decisions depend on it.
5. Run every pipeline as a learning loop
Track more than newly surfaced companies. Save, pass and evaluation decisions help you see where to refine your own criteria. An investment team's decisions and notes remain private. FoundMatter does not automatically change your mandate based on those decisions.
A good pipeline gets smaller and more relevant as the investment criteria become clearer. More results are not success when analyst time per material opportunity increases.
Weekly exercise: choose no more than five unhandled matches. Record the fit reason, source date and one next decision for each. Recapturing an old team page does not mean the team has changed. Without comparative evidence, use “needs review”, not “materially changed”.
Sources and context
The links provide context. These exercises are selected starting points from Paul Krügel's work with founders, not the complete framework. They are not investment, legal, tax or financial advice.