Poach

Poach is the lightning-fast intelligence platform that gives venture capitalists and angel investors a decisive edge in sourcing deals. It operates on a simple, powerful premise: track the early signals. By monitoring who top-tier VCs follow on social media, particularly Twitter (X), Poach identifies promising startup founders long before they officially enter a fundraising cycle. This creates an invaluable, pre-emptive signal that sits perfectly between a warm introduction and a cold inbound pitch. The platform automates the entire discovery process, delivering enriched, actionable data directly to your inbox or via API every morning. It's built for investors who need to move quickly, expand their deal flow efficiently, and identify the next wave of entrepreneurial talent before the competition even knows they exist. With Poach, you're not just tracking deals; you're discovering founders at the moment of inception.

VC Social Tracking

Poach's core engine continuously monitors the Twitter follows of leading venture capitalists. These follows are not random; they are often the first signal of investor interest in a promising individual or nascent project. The platform aggregates this data at scale, transforming passive social activity into a proactive, targeted lead list for your firm, saving you countless hours of manual scraping and guesswork.

AI-Powered Identity & Labeling

Speed is useless without accuracy. Poach uses proprietary identity resolution to match Twitter profiles with LinkedIn accounts, instantly enriching records with professional history and education. Our AI then analyzes both sources to label each person with precise tags like "founder," "engineering," "funded," or "research." This allows for hyper-specific filtering to match your investment thesis in seconds.

Daily Dealflow Digest

Get a competitive advantage delivered daily. Every morning, receive an executive summary email with the most promising new leads, complete with enriched CSV attachments. This hands-off, automated delivery ensures you start each day with a curated, data-rich list of potential investments without lifting a finger, keeping your pipeline full and your process efficient.

Raw Data Export & API Access

For teams that need to integrate intelligence directly into their CRM or build custom workflows, Poach provides full access. Download comprehensive CSV exports of all tracked individuals or pull data programmatically via our robust API. Filter, sort, and analyze the raw data on your own terms to build the perfect target list for outbound sourcing campaigns.

Identifying Stealth-Mode Founders

The primary use case is finding founders operating in stealth before their seed round is announced. By filtering for individuals labeled "founder" but not "funded," investors can discover and reach out to talented entrepreneurs building the next big thing, often securing a conversation months before traditional channels catch on.

Thesis-Driven Founder Sourcing

Investors with a specific focus (e.g., AI researchers, ex-FAANG engineers, PhDs in biotech) can use Poach's AI labels to laser-target their search. Instead of broad networking, you can instantly filter for "research" + "founder" or "engineering" + "web3" to build a list of individuals who perfectly align with your firm's specialized investment strategy.

Competitive & Market Intelligence

Track which VCs are showing early interest in which sectors and individual founders. This provides invaluable market signals about emerging trends and competitive movements. Understanding who other respected investors are watching can validate your own hypotheses or reveal new areas of opportunity you hadn't considered.

Enhancing Outbound Sourcing Efforts

Replace inefficient, spray-and-pray outbound with highly targeted, context-rich outreach. Poach provides the name, background, and a key signal (who followed them) to craft a personalized, high-context introduction. This dramatically increases response rates compared to cold emails, making your sourcing team vastly more effective.

How does Poach identify potential founders?

Poach identifies potential founders by algorithmically tracking the Twitter accounts that top-tier venture capitalists choose to follow. These follows are analyzed as early signals of interest. The platform then enriches these Twitter profiles with LinkedIn data and uses AI to label individuals, specifically identifying those who are founders but have not yet raised significant venture capital.

What kind of data do I receive each day?

You receive a daily email digest containing an executive summary of new and noteworthy leads. Attached is a comprehensive CSV file with detailed data on each tracked individual, including their Twitter handle, full name, LinkedIn URL, who followed them, AI-generated labels (e.g., founder, engineer), and a concise bio summarizing their background and current work.

Can I filter the data for specific criteria?

Absolutely. You can filter the raw CSV data or API output using any column. The most powerful filters use the AI-generated labels. For example, you can filter for rows containing the "founder" label while excluding the "funded" label to find unfunded, stealth-mode founders, or combine labels like "engineering" and "web3" for a very specific search.

Is the data sourced ethically and compliantly?

Yes. Poach only utilizes publicly available information from social media platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn. The platform does not access private messages or non-public data. It aggregates and enriches this public data to provide actionable insights, operating within the standard boundaries of business intelligence and social media monitoring.