How can AI help me find investor mandates and criteria?
Short answer
AI helps most with sorting, not sourcing. I use it to read investor mandates, pull out check size, sector and geography, and compare them to a deal. The mandates themselves still have to come from investors, through their websites, interviews and direct conversations. Use AI to organize and screen what you collect, then confirm every criterion with the investor before you send anything.
Start with real mandates, then let AI sort them
Real mandates come from investors, so that is where I would start. At Family Office Club we publish daily investor mandates and interview investors every day. Those come from people who actually write checks. AI cannot invent that for you. It can help you read it faster.
"That's also why we do our daily investor mandates and interview investors every day: to help them get deal flow."
Once you have a pile of mandates, interview notes and website criteria, paste them into an AI tool. Ask it to pull the same fields from each one. A table is easier to scan than twenty pages of notes.
- Check size range
- Sectors they like and sectors they avoid
- Geography
- Structures they use, such as LP, co-GP or convertible note
- Stage of the company or deal
- Anything they say they decline
Then give the AI a short summary of your own deal and ask it to rank the investors by fit. Ask it to quote the line from the mandate that supports each ranking. If it cannot quote one, treat that match as a guess.
This webinar shows the kinds of mandates we collect, from real estate to angel investors to billion-dollar-plus family offices.
Write your own criteria before you search
Matching only works if you know what you want from an investor. In his FAST system, Ray makes this the first step. He says to develop an investor criteria before building the list. Will you seek accredited investors or not, people from your industry or outside it, local or national? What are your investor minimums?
Ray then qualifies each investor with three questions. Do they have capital to invest right now? Have they invested in early stage companies like yours? Are they interested in your kind of deal? AI is good at turning those three questions into a short screening email or a call script. It can also check a mandate against them in seconds.
Ray explains why finding and qualifying investors comes before the pitch deck.
Summary and key takeaways from this video
Where AI stops and people start
AI can be wrong, and mandates go out of date. An investor may change focus after one bad deal or one good one. Always confirm the criteria with the investor or their team before you pitch. A short, honest email asking if you fit is better than a polished pitch sent to the wrong person.
The tools we build at Family Office Club help with preparation. One analyzes a pitch deck on 25 criteria. Another checks your investor email before you send it. I should be clear that we do not have statistics showing these tools lead to more closed deals. What we hear is that people save time. One investor told us a tool saved them more than 10 hours in a month or two.
Here I walk through a few of our AI tools and answer a question about whether we can prove results.
Summary and key takeaways from this video
Last, many sponsors talk to a securities attorney about how they approach investors and what they say to them before they reach out at scale.
More from my talks
Whatever you ask AI to match against, the criteria have to be specific first. I find a lot of people on the investor side have not formalized their criteria, and a lot of capital raisers do the same on theirs. If you tell me you are raising from high net worth investors or from family offices, that does not help you at all. Write down exactly who your investor is before you ask any tool to rank a list.
"If you make this too tight, you'll never make an investment. So it's figuring out that balance. I want to make sure that the investment firms here and the investors here have this criteria down and have very specific criteria they're looking for, because I find a lot of people don't have this formalized."
"An investor avatar should be very specific. If you say, "I'm raising capital from high net worth," that's such a basic thing. Or, "I'm raising capital from family offices." Well, that's not going to help you at all."
Key facts
- Family Office Club publishes daily investor mandates and interviews investors every day.
- The pitch deck tool analyzes a deck on 25 criteria and returns seven one-liners, and you can ask for seven more.
- Ray's FAST system starts with finding investors and developing investor criteria, including minimums, before any pitch deck work.
Sources
From Richard C. Wilson's Centimillionaire Strategies YouTube channel: 7 Strategies to Leverage Our Investor Club and Raise More Capital (Webinar Recording), Mental Models, AI, And Investor Edge: How To Think Differently And Raise Smarter Capital, Fast Fundraising - Success In 60 Days. Quotes come from the video captions, lightly edited for readability. Figures are the speakers' own estimates and experience.
General education only. Not legal, tax or investment advice.
Talk to a securities attorney to explore options around investor outreach rules, investor eligibility criteria and deal structure options. Do not use AI to write your own legal agreements.
Where to start
- Write your own investor criteria first: accredited or not, industry, location and minimums.
- Collect real mandates from investor interviews, websites and conversations.
- Ask AI to pull the same fields from each mandate into one table.
- Have AI rank the investors against your deal and quote the supporting line.
- Confirm each criterion with the investor and consider talking to a securities attorney about your outreach.
Follow-up questions
Can AI tell me which family offices will invest in my deal?
No. It can screen what you give it, but it cannot know an investor's current appetite. Confirm directly with the investor.
What should I ask AI to pull from a mandate?
Check size, sectors, geography, structures, stage and what the investor declines. Use the same fields every time so you can compare.
Should I send my full pitch deck to investors I found with AI?
I would not. Qualify them first with a short note asking if you fit. A full presentation is a lot to ask before you know they invest in deals like yours.
Related questions
- What AI tools help build an investor target list?General AI assistants like Claude or GPT help most.
- Is it risky to put investor data into ChatGPT?Yes, it can be.
- How do I use AI to research family offices?Ask a tool like ChatGPT or Grok to run deep research on a specific person at a specific family office.
- How can I use AI to practice my investor pitch?Use AI to practice in three passes.
Work through it with the family office fit check. See all ai for capital raising resources.