The single most common mistake in early seed pipelining is treating Crunchbase like a roster. Two thousand seed-stage venture funds exist; somewhere between forty and eighty of them are the right list for your specific company, your specific sector, your specific check size, and your specific stage.
The work of figuring out which forty to eighty is the work of pipelining. Done well, it takes a focused week. Done poorly, it is a six-month exercise in being politely declined by funds that were never going to write your check.
This is the method we use, broken down enough that you can build the same list before your first cold email.
Step 1: Define disqualifiers first.
Before you research a single fund, write down the things that disqualify a fund from your list. Disqualifiers are usually four to seven items long for a seed company:
- Stage. Funds whose smallest check is larger than your round. A growth fund that "occasionally does seed" will pass for fund-allocation reasons no matter how good the meeting is.
- Sector. Funds with stated avoid-sectors that match yours (e.g., "no crypto, no defense, no consumer hardware"). Public statements like these are real.
- Geography. Funds that only invest in US-only or only in Europe-only, when you are the other.
- Conflicts. Funds that have a meaningful position in a direct competitor.
- Check structure. Funds that only lead and never follow, when you already have a lead. Funds that never lead, when you do not have one.
- Founder fit. Funds whose stated thesis explicitly does not fit yours.
A disqualifier list is not the same as a "do not contact" list. It is a list of funds you have removed from consideration based on observable facts. The benefit is that it makes the next steps much faster.
Step 2: Build tier A.
Tier A is the funds that have, in the last 12 months, written a check the same size as the one you are raising, in your specific sector, led by a partner whose thesis fits.
There are usually 10 to 20 of these. You will research them carefully. You will read their recent investments, read the partner's Twitter, read any podcast they have done. You will know which portfolio company is the closest analog to yours and have a sentence ready about how you compare.
Tier A is where your highest-quality warm paths go. It is also where you will spend the most preparation per meeting. The expected hit rate on tier A, with warm intros, is 30–40% — meaning 3 to 8 of the tier A funds will progress to a serious second conversation.
Step 3: Build tier B.
Tier B is the funds that almost qualify for tier A — they have written checks in adjacent sectors, or at slightly different stages, or led by a partner whose thesis is close but not exact. There are usually 30 to 50 of these for a seed company.
Tier B is your volume layer. The expected hit rate is lower — 10–20% — but the absolute number of conversions is often comparable to tier A because the population is larger. You will use a lighter touch here: a more templated cold email, a shorter meeting prep document, a willingness to qualify in or out of detail on the first call.
Step 4: Build tier C.
Tier C is everything else that passed your disqualifier list. Funds with relevant geography and stage but no clear thesis match. Funds that are too new to have a track record. Funds that do occasional seed checks but are not built for it. Solo capitalists you have heard about secondhand.
Tier C is mostly there to wash out the soft yes — the partner who tells everyone "we look at everything" and then never invests. You will not spend much preparation per tier C contact. You will respond to inbound from tier C politely and briefly. You will not chase tier C cold.
Total list size: 80 to 120. Some founders run smaller (40) to focus; some run larger (200) to absorb optionality. The 80–120 range is the most common for a $2–5M seed.
A 400-name pipeline is not a more ambitious version of a 100-name pipeline. It is a pipeline that nobody will actually maintain. The math gets worse as the list gets longer.
Step 5: Warm paths.
Once your tiered list exists, the next exercise is finding warm paths. A warm path is any way to get introduced to a partner that is not a cold email.
In rough order of conversion strength:
You will not have warm paths to every tier A fund. You will have warm paths to maybe 30–60% of tier A. The remaining tier A funds you will cold-email, but with a much higher bar for the email itself (see step 7).
Step 6: The intro request.
When you ask a portfolio founder for an intro, do it in a structured way. The pattern that works:
- A short message to the founder, not the partner directly.
- One sentence on what you are doing and the round.
- One sentence on why this specific partner.
- An attached forwardable email — 4–6 sentences, written from the partner's perspective, that the founder can paste into a new email to the partner without editing.
The forwardable email is the single highest-leverage artifact in your intro request. If the founder has to write the email themselves, they will do it in 30% of cases. If you write a clean version they can forward, they will do it in 80% of cases. Same intent; six times the conversion.
Step 7: The cold email.
For the funds you cannot warm-intro to, the cold email has to do a lot of work. The shape that works:
- Subject line. Specific, no hype. "[Company] seed — $X target — would love your read" is fine. "Revolutionary AI-native platform" is not.
- Line 1. Why this partner specifically. Reference a recent investment of theirs in your sector. One sentence.
- Line 2. What you do, in plain English. One sentence.
- Line 3. The most credible traction signal you can show. One number or one customer name.
- Line 4. The ask. "Open to a 20-minute call next week?"
- Sign-off. Real name, real role, link to the deck.
Cold-email conversion rates for tier A partners at a seed range from 5–15% to a first call, depending on the credibility of the signal in line 3. There are no clever subject-line tricks that move this number meaningfully. The number moves when the underlying signal is stronger.
Step 8: Sequencing.
Send tier A first. The reason is not that tier A is more important — it is — but that the response time from tier A is slower (3–10 days) and the diligence is deeper. You want tier A in motion before tier B accelerates the close-by date.
A reasonable cadence for a 4-month seed:
- Weeks 1–2: Tier A outreach. Warm intros first, then cold emails.
- Weeks 3–4: First-call wave with tier A. Tier B outreach begins.
- Weeks 5–8: Second meetings, tier A. First calls, tier B. Tier C activated on inbound.
- Weeks 9–12: Term sheet conversations. Tier B closing wave.
- Weeks 13–16: Close, signing, wires.
Adjust for your reality. The point is to not let tier B chase tier A — they should run in parallel, with tier A starting a week or two ahead.
Step 9: Maintenance.
A pipeline is a living artifact. Investors move funds. Funds change thesis. New funds appear. Partners leave for new chairs.
A useful discipline: every Friday, spend 30 minutes on the list. Check for new fund news. Update the stage of any investor whose status moved this week. Add any new fund that ran a public investment that fits your thesis. Remove any that you have decided are no longer worth contacting.
Thirty minutes a week is enough. Less is too little; more is procrastination.
A note on tools.
In Arx, the investor pipeline is built around exactly this method. Tier A/B/C as stages. Disqualifiers as filters. Recent-activity signals (last check in your sector, last partner-led deal) surfaced on each row. Warm-path mapping pulled from your LinkedIn graph.
But the method is older than the tool. We learned it from founders who did this in Notion, in Sheets, in their head. The shape of the work is what matters; pick the tool that lets you do it without bleeding hours into setup.
The summary.
Eighty to a hundred and twenty partners. Three tiers. Disqualifiers first, warm paths second, cold emails third. Maintenance weekly. Spend the heaviest preparation on tier A, the lightest on tier C, and treat tier B as the volume layer that does most of your conversion.
A list built like this is the difference between a four-month round and an eight-month one. The list is the round.