The most underused channel in fundraising is the form founders skip: should you apply to VCs through their website form?

Sunny Ray · Jun 12, 2026 · 5 min read

The VC application form is the most underused channel in fundraising, because founders have decided it's a black hole.

Yes, apply through the website form when a fund has one. A form is how that fund has told you it wants to receive deals. It's structured, it drops into their system the way they designed it, and it shows you can follow instructions. Fill it out properly, then run your cold email alongside it, not instead of it. The real limit isn't whether forms get read. It's that most funds don't have one.

Why we bet on forms

On June 9 we made a call on our internal weekly: we'd start filling out investor application forms as a service for our fundraising clients. The target was about 50 forms per client, with a pilot for one client that same week, then rolling it to the rest.

The reasoning went like this. Forms beat cold email with VCs for three reasons.

• They're structured. Every answer is where the fund expects it, so nobody has to dig through an email to find stage, sector, round size and traction.
• They match the fund's own systems. A form lands in whatever system the fund set up to receive deals. Your email lands in one partner's inbox, between everything else.
• They signal deference. A founder who uses the front door the fund built is a founder who reads instructions. That's a small signal, but early-stage investing runs on small signals.

Someone on that call was blunt about it:

It's 100 sure that it will work.

The plan was to start with a person filling forms by hand, then build an agent to do it once we knew what good looked like. The same day, on a client call, we told a founder that a new team member was joining to do exactly this, as an extra channel next to his email campaigns.

The one-in-ten problem

Three days later the bet met reality. On June 12 I was on a call with a builder Charles had introduced to us for the form problem. He'd built an agentic system that evaluates startups the way a VC would: several analyst agents running in parallel, then a synthesis, then an itemized report against a fund's own criteria. It even drafts the response a founder never usually gets, explaining why they weren't advanced.

We walked through the forms side of the fundraising platform we're building. It had about 50,000 forms indexed, filterable by sector and fund size. It scans fund websites, finds the application form and auto-fills it with AI. In the demo, safe mode was on, so every submission saved as a draft and nothing went out.

Then the catch: only about one in ten VC sites has a public application form.

Nine out of ten funds don't have a front door. You email a partner, you get an intro, or you don't get in.

Airtable and off-site forms

The one-in-ten that do have forms don't make it easy either. Many don't host the form on their own site. They link out to Airtable or another off-site tool, which is hard to scrape and harder to fill automatically. Some forms ask for a deck upload, some for a link, some for twenty fields of free text.

His view was that it's solvable, and he described it as not a tricky project compared to what he'd built before. What he needed from us was simple: a couple of example forms to build against. Real ones, with all their mess.

Fifty forms per founder: how we run it

Here's how the work breaks down when you do it properly.

• Filter first. Only funds that invest at your stage, in your sector, at your check size. A form sent to the wrong fund is worse than no form, because it's on record.
• Write the answers once, well. Most forms ask the same ten things. Get those answers sharp and consistent, then adapt per form.
• Fill every field. A half-empty form reads as a half-interested founder.
• Track it. Which fund, which date, which version of your answers. When a partner emails three weeks later, you want to know what they saw.

Fifty is a meaningful number. In May I saved a post on X arguing that investor lists should be filtered by geography, stage, check size and thesis, and that spraying two thousand funds is a mistake. Forms enforce that discipline. Nobody fills out two thousand forms. You fill out the fifty that fit.

Forms plus email, not forms instead of email

Do forms get read? The honest answer is that it varies, and you'll rarely know for sure. That's exactly why forms should be one channel, not the only one.

The setup we like: submit the form, and run cold email to the right partner at the same fund. The email can mention the submission in one line, so the partner knows the full details are already in their system. The form gives you structure and a record. The email gives you a person. If the fund has no form, the email does all the work, ideally with an invitation to come on your show instead of a pitch.

Fundraising is a numbers game played with a short list. Forms are one more way to get the same fifty right names to look at you, through a door they built themselves.

If you want investor outreach run across every channel that fund uses, see how we put founders in front of investors.

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