The funnel
101considered for every 1 invested, in a survey of institutional VCs
- 28of every 101, meet the founders
- 10of every 101, reviewed with partners
- ~5of every 101, go through due diligence
- 1.7of every 101, get a term sheet
- 1of every 101, invested
Sources
Funnel from Gompers, Gornall, Kaplan and Strebulaev, “How Do Venture Capitalists Make Decisions?”, Journal of Financial Economics, 2020 (survey of 885 institutional VCs at 681 firms, Table 6), also summarized by Ilya Strebulaev, Stanford GSB, 2026. Stage splits vary by firm and investment focus. The same survey reports VCs taking an average of 83 days to close a deal (73 days for early-stage firms) and an average of 118 hours of due diligence per deal; Strebulaev reports about 15 hours a week spent sourcing and screening. The stages Safqos is built to compress are the early ones: scoring every deal against your declared criteria and itemizing its risk before you read it.




