Poach

About Poach

Poach is a powerful dealflow intelligence platform designed for venture capitalists and early-stage investors. Its core mission is to help you discover and connect with promising startup founders long before they officially begin their fundraising process. In the competitive world of venture capital, timing is everything. Poach provides a critical early signal by tracking the social media activity of top-tier VCs, specifically who they follow on Twitter. These follows are often a subtle but powerful indicator of early interest in emerging talent and new ventures. Poach then enriches this data, transforming raw social signals into actionable, high-quality leads. This places the intelligence you receive in a valuable sweet spot—it's more informed than a cold inbound message but doesn't require an existing network connection, effectively democratizing access to early-stage opportunities. By delivering daily executive summaries and comprehensive CSV exports directly to your inbox, Poach empowers investment teams to systematically expand and qualify their dealflow, ensuring they never miss a potential unicorn in the making.

Features of Poach

VC Social Tracking

Poach's foundation is its automated monitoring of venture capitalists on Twitter. The platform continuously tracks which individuals top-tier VCs choose to follow. Since investors often follow founders they find interesting or are engaging with privately, this activity serves as a powerful, non-public signal of early interest. This feature provides you with a real-time feed of potential investment targets that are already on the radar of respected peers in the industry.

LinkedIn Enrichment & Identity Resolution

Raw Twitter handles alone aren't enough for thorough due diligence. Poach uses proprietary identity resolution technology to accurately match Twitter accounts with their corresponding LinkedIn profiles. This process automatically enriches each lead with crucial professional background information, including detailed work history, education, and career trajectory, giving you a complete picture of each person's experience and credentials.

AI-Powered Profile Labeling

To help you quickly sort and prioritize leads, Poach employs advanced AI to analyze the combined Twitter and LinkedIn data. The system automatically labels each person with relevant tags such as "founder," "engineer," "researcher," or "funded." It also generates a concise, informative bio summarizing their background. This automation saves you countless hours of manual research and enables precise filtering.

Raw Data Delivery & Export

You maintain full control and access to the underlying data. Poach delivers everything directly to you via easy-to-use CSV files attached to your daily email digest. These exports contain all the enriched data points, labels, and bios, allowing you to import leads directly into your CRM, sort them using spreadsheets, or filter for very specific criteria like "unfunded founders in AI."

Use Cases of Poach

Identifying Stealth-Mode Founders

The primary use case is finding founders who are building in stealth mode, long before they list their company on LinkedIn or announce a fundraise. By filtering for profiles labeled "founder" but not "funded," investors can discover and reach out to talented entrepreneurs at the earliest possible stage, often securing a conversation months before their formal seed round.

Thesis-Driven Investor Sourcing

Investors with a specific focus (e.g., AI for science, climate tech, or former YouTube product managers) can use Poach's labeled data and searchable exports to find individuals that perfectly match their investment thesis. This moves sourcing from a broad networking game to a targeted, data-driven search for specific skill sets and backgrounds.

Competitive Dealflow Analysis

Track which founders are being followed by investors at competing firms. This provides insight into what kinds of companies and founders your competitors are looking at, allowing you to benchmark your own sourcing strategy and ensure you're seeing the same high-quality opportunities.

Building a Proprietary Outreach Pipeline

Instead of relying on inbound applications or warm intros, investment teams can use Poach to build a systematic, outbound pipeline of potential investments. The daily delivery of enriched leads creates a consistent workflow for associates to research and contact high-potential individuals, building a scalable and repeatable process for generating new deals.

Frequently Asked Questions

How does Poach find founders before they raise?

Poach detects early signals by monitoring who well-known venture capitalists follow on social media, particularly Twitter. VCs often follow founders they meet informally or whose early work they admire. This activity happens months before a founder publicly launches a startup or starts fundraising, giving Poach users a significant head start in identifying talent.

What kind of data do I receive each day?

You receive a daily email digest containing an executive summary of the most interesting leads identified that day. Attached to the email is a comprehensive CSV file with all the data, including Twitter handles, full names, matched LinkedIn profiles, which VC followed them, AI-generated labels, and a synthesized bio. This gives you both a quick overview and the raw data for deep analysis.

How accurate is the AI labeling?

Poach's AI labeling is highly accurate, as it analyzes multiple data points from both Twitter bios and detailed LinkedIn work history. The system is trained to identify specific professional patterns and keywords to assign labels like "founder," "engineer," or "researcher." This provides a reliable filter, though we always encourage users to review the full profile for final confirmation.

Can I filter for very specific types of founders?

Absolutely. Since you receive the complete dataset in a CSV file, you can filter and sort using any column. A common example is filtering for rows where the "labels" column contains "founder" but does NOT contain "funded" to find pre-seed, bootstrapped entrepreneurs. You can also filter by location, previous companies, or keywords in the bio.