Fundraising runs on warm intros. Here's how to manufacture them.

There is an uncomfortable fact about early-stage fundraising that no one tells first-time founders clearly enough: the round is mostly decided by who will introduce you, not by how good your cold email is.

In the first half of 2025, roughly 68% of seed deals were sourced through a warm introduction — up from 55% a year earlier. A well-crafted cold email to a partner who's never heard of you gets a reply something like 1–2% of the time. A warm intro from someone that partner trusts converts to a first meeting 20–30% of the time. The gap isn't small. It's an order of magnitude.

This is not a piece telling you that cold outreach is dead. It isn't — more on that below. It's a piece telling you that warm introductions are the dominant channel, that your ability to generate them is a real and trainable skill, and that you almost certainly have more raw material to work with than you think.

A warm intro is not luck. It's the visible output of social capital you've been accumulating for years without labeling it.

01. Social capital is the asset. Treat it like one.

Founders track runway, burn, and pipeline obsessively. Almost none of them track the one asset that most determines whether the round happens at all: who, in their existing network, can vouch for them to an investor.

Social capital is exactly that — the accumulated trust other people are willing to spend on your behalf. When a founder a partner respects sends an email that says "you should really talk to this person," they are lending you a slice of their own credibility. That loan is worth more than any deck.

The mistake is treating this as something you either have or don't. You build it the same way you build anything: by being useful, being memorable, and staying in contact with people over years, most of whom have nothing to do with fundraising at the time.

02. Cold outreach isn't dead. It's just the weaker default.

Let's be precise, because the internet oversells both sides of this.

Cold outreach as a default strategy is low-yield. Baseline reply rates sit around 1–2%, and they've been drifting down as investor inboxes fill up. If your plan is "email 200 partners and hope," you will spend your raise demoralized.

But cold outreach is not worthless, and it is not dying. A growing number of VCs now explicitly invite cold inbound, and when a founder sends a genuinely personalized, well-targeted email to one of them — specific to that partner's thesis, with real traction in the first two lines — reply rates climb to 15–25%. That's a different game.

So the honest hierarchy is this: a warm intro beats a great cold email; a great cold email to a receptive investor beats a generic one; a generic blast beats nothing, barely. Cold outreach is the tool you use when no warm path exists — not the tool you reach for first.

03. You have more network than you think.

Here is the part most first-time founders get wrong. They picture their network as "people I can already email about money," conclude it's nearly empty, and resign themselves to cold outreach.

Your actual network is much wider. It includes:

• Other founders you've met — especially ones one or two stages ahead of you. A founder whose company is at $5M–$50M and who took the same path you're on is the single highest-converting source of intros there is (portfolio-founder intros convert in the 30–40% range).
• Friends and former colleagues — the ex-coworker who left to join a fund, the friend whose old boss is now an angel, the college acquaintance who's three degrees from the partner you want.
• People you see at events — the recurring faces at demo days, founder dinners, and industry meetups are a network whether or not you've formalized it.
• Your advisors and early backers — and once you close your first check, **your own investors are your best source of further intros.** A happy seed investor who makes three introductions is worth more than any list you can buy.
• Your users and customers — a customer who loves you and happens to know an investor is a warm intro hiding in plain sight.

The world is genuinely small, and proximity to the people you're trying to reach is usually one or two connections closer than you assume.

The world is genuinely small. One time I was at an event in New York and bumped into Marc Andreessen. The distance between you and the people you're trying to reach is almost always shorter than the plan in your head.

04. How to manufacture a warm intro, concretely.

Warm intros feel like luck. They're mostly process. Here's the sequence that works:

Map your targets first. Build a list of 40 or so investors who actually fit your stage and sector. For each, open their portfolio and find one or two founders at stage-appropriate companies — not the billion-dollar exits who won't remember you, the $5M–$50M founders who might.

Find the path. For each target, check LinkedIn (or your own memory) for a mutual connection. This is tedious; it's also where the round is quietly won or lost. A couple of hours of this typically surfaces five to eight viable intro paths.

Ask for advice before you ask for an intro. Counterintuitively, the best opener to a founder you admire isn't "can you introduce me to your investors." It's a specific, genuine request for advice. Founders enjoy being the teacher. If they get excited about what you're building, the intro offer comes unprompted — and an intro someone volunteers is far warmer than one they were cornered into.

Make the intro easy to send. When someone agrees, send them a short forwardable blurb: one line on what you do, one line on traction, one line on the ask. Respect the double opt-in — good connectors check with both sides first, and you want to be the founder who made that effortless.

Start early. Begin building these relationships 10–12 weeks before you need the money, ideally earlier. Intros sent the week you start raising feel rushed. Relationships that predate your raise feel like destiny.

This is exactly the workflow Arx is built for. Mapping targets, surfacing who your network actually knows, and getting the ask out the door is the whole point. The principle holds with or without the tooling, but it does get overwhelming and tiring when you run it from your spreadsheets.

05. The thing under all of this.

Every warm intro is the settlement of a relationship that already existed. Which means the real work doesn't happen during the raise — it happens in the year before it, in all the small moments where you were useful to someone with no expectation of return.

That's also why this compounds. The founder you help today introduces you next year. The investor you keep warm with honest monthly updates makes three intros for your Series A. Social capital, unlike runway, grows when you spend it well.

So map your network before you need it. Track who can vouch for you the way you track burn. Treat cold outreach as the fallback, not the plan. And remember that the person standing between you and the partner you most want to reach is, more often than not, someone you already know.

*This piece is part of a series on running a modern early-stage raise. If you want the mechanics of the round itself, start with a modern seed round, in eight steps.*