AI Maturity & Capital Readiness Assessment

We can name, in one sentence, the specific advantage our AI gives a customer that a competitor cannot easily copy.

Our product depends on proprietary data, a fine-tuned model, or a workflow we own, not solely on a third-party API anyone can call.

We can explain to a technical investor why our approach gets stronger as more customers use it, with evidence rather than assertion.

We have a working product in real users' hands today, not a prototype that only runs in a controlled demo.

We have a deliberate position on which parts of our stack we build versus rent, and we can defend it.

We have identified the model, data, or regulatory risks that could undercut our moat, and we can say what we are doing about each.

We can size our TAM, SAM, and SOM from the bottom up, using real prices and customer counts rather than a slice of an analyst's headline figure.

We have paying customers, or signed commitments, that we can name and a reference investor could call.

Our core growth metric has moved in the right direction for at least the past three months, and we can show the chart.

We track retention or usage that proves customers keep coming back, not just that they tried us once.

We know our approximate cost to acquire a customer and the revenue that customer returns over time.

We can explain why now is the moment this market opens, tied to a real shift rather than to hype.

Our founding team covers the core skills this company needs to win, and we can name the one gap we are hiring for next.

At least one founder has direct, specific experience with this problem or this customer, beyond general ambition.

We ship meaningful product improvements on a regular cadence, and we can show what changed over the last quarter.

Equity is split among founders and early team in a way we have written down and would not be embarrassed to show an investor.

We make decisions and recover from mistakes quickly, and we can point to a recent example of changing course on evidence.

Our advisors or early backers are people an investor would recognize as a signal, not names added for decoration.

We have a pitch deck that tells a clear story in ten to fifteen slides, and an outsider can follow it without us narrating.

We have a financial model built bottom-up, with assumptions a sceptical investor could pressure-test line by line.

We can state how much we are raising, what it buys in milestones, and what those milestones unlock for the next round.

We have a data room assembled and current: cap table, incorporation, key contracts, and core metrics, ready to share within a day.

We can explain our technology to a non-technical investor in plain language without losing the substance.

We have a one-line and a one-paragraph version of what we do that we use consistently, and our materials all agree with each other.

We have a target list of investors who actually fund our stage, sector, and check size, not a generic list of well-known names.

We understand the basic mechanics of the round we are raising, including instrument, valuation, dilution, and the main term-sheet levers.

We have a clean cap table with no unresolved founder, option, or past-investor issues that would slow diligence.

We can articulate our valuation expectation and back it with comparable rounds rather than a number we would like to be true.

We have planned the raise as a time-boxed process with warm introductions, parallel conversations, and a target close date.

We know what we will do if the round takes longer or comes in smaller than hoped, including our true runway in months.