Investors require a lot facts to make an informed decision on investing in your startup. The more information available to them, the faster they will be able to examine it and make an informed decision. You must have all the important documents in your data room before you start talking to investors (or as soon as you can).
In addition to the key investment documents you’ll need for any due diligence, founders should include their most recent investor presentation, basic financials for past performance and projections, cap table, and company organization/formation documentation (including business certificates, articles of incorporation, tax information, etc.). Being able to access these documents in your investor data room will allow investors to quickly and easily create an agreement memo or a conversation between their partners which could result in an offer on a term sheet.
A deal attribution analysis is another useful document to include in your investor data rooms. This document demonstrates how your team invested in other startups and will to reassure potential LPs you are capable of making smart investments. It is possible to include additional information such as intellectual property information, contracts with suppliers and customers marketing research, and much more.
You can add documents to your data room at any time, but it’s important that you only allow access to an investor who is serious about committing to an agreement in a termsheet. It may delay the process if you allow an investor access to your data room before he’s prepared. They may even decide to not invest.
