Martin Tobias was pitched by about 4,500 startups last year. He wrote 10 checks.
Now the pre-seed investor is offering the rest of them a consolation prize: an AI tool that tells founders which investors are most likely to say yes.
Tobias, a longtime figure in the Seattle tech scene, is now based in Spokane, Wash. He founded Loudeye, a digital media company that went public during the dot-com boom and later sold to Nokia, and went on to lead biofuel maker Imperium Renewables and group-buying startup Tippr.
He was a venture partner at Ignition Partners, an early backer of DocuSign, before starting Incisive Ventures in 2020. The firm closed a $10.5 million fund last year to back early-stage B2B software companies.
Investor Match started as an internal tool to help Incisive’s portfolio companies find seed and Series A investors. Tobias said he has 17,000 contacts but can only keep about 150 of them in his head, a limit known as Dunbar’s number.
To use the tool, founders upload a pitch deck, and Investor Match returns 20 investors ranked by fit, based on stage, check size, geography and what each firm has actually backed. It also drafts outreach emails, but it doesn’t send them.
Most founders send those emails cold, or pass the list to their existing investors and ask for warm introductions, Tobias said. Investors who have accounts on the platform can also respond to founders directly.
A free preview shows all 20 matches with fit scores, with the top three fully expanded. The full list costs $20, which Tobias said roughly covers the API costs of running it, about $1,000 a month.
Every founder Tobias turns down now gets pointed to the tool.
“Just because I wasn’t the right investor for that company doesn’t mean that the right investor wasn’t out there,” he told GeekWire.
Incisive appears on the platform like any other investor. Some founders who were matched with the firm asked whether Tobias had tilted the algorithm toward himself. He said he hadn’t, and that he only wants pitches that actually fit.
Other companies offer investor matching as part of broader fundraising platforms, including Metal and OpenVC, which Tobias said charge founders monthly subscriptions. He said OpenVC relies on simple keyword matching, while Investor Match uses AI to read each investor’s website, portfolio and blog posts, which takes “millions and millions of tokens.”
Some of those companies are trying to build venture-scale businesses off founders’ fundraising, Tobias said.
“I think that’s just f—ing evil,” he said. “I don’t think you should try to make money off people who quit their job and are putting everything into trying to raise their first one to $2 million.”
Founders have told Tobias they’ve raised more than $100 million from investors they found through the platform since it launched about six months ago, though he acknowledged he can’t verify that because the money doesn’t flow through Investor Match.
Investor Match is also an extension of his investing thesis. He said his fund looks for B2B software companies like DocuSign that “reduce friction at scale” by taking a business process and doing it better in software.
“That’s exactly what Investor Match is,” he said. “What’s the friction in the market that you’re dealing with? Investors finding founders, founders finding investors. OK, can software help with that? I think it can.”
