Investment-grade startup appraisal
For anyone — investors, advisories and founders alike — who needs more than a pitch deck. Real analyst depth per assessment, across 16 value growth dimensions, five evidence levels, and a valuation range with explicit uplift triggers.
A structured assessment built entirely from publicly available information — website, company databases, published research, public filings. No documents needed, no conversation required. It tells you where a startup stands, what the market can already see, and where potential gaps are.
All sixteen value growth dimensions are covered — customer definition, pain point, need-to-have, competitive advantage, market timing, team, moat, monetisation, and more. Each dimension is scored and graded against a five-level evidence scale. Where public information is insufficient, the report says so explicitly — which is itself useful information. The gaps that can't be closed from public information are also, not coincidentally, the gaps that move the valuation range.
Delivers: Public Information Assessment · Value Growth Map · Valuation with uplift triggers · Deal signal
You are an investor. You see hundreds of startups a year. Most come with a pitch deck and a story. Deciding which ones deserve deeper attention costs time you don't have — and commissioning a professional due diligence at €25,000 per company doesn't scale. So you rely on pattern recognition, gut feel, and a thirty-minute call. Some good deals slip through. You know this. The only thing a polished pitch proves is that someone knows how to polish a pitch.
You are a startup. You're selling a piece of your business in a buyer's market. Buyers hate uncertainty — whether they're buying a house, a car, or equity in your company. Smart sellers remove it. A real estate agent hires an appraiser. A car dealer provides an inspection report. You should be doing the same. At €25,000 for a professional due diligence, you couldn't. Now you can.
The Startup Mentor™ delivers the full desk-based due diligence — reading the deck, researching the market, assessing the team, building the evidence picture, writing the report. The part that takes an analyst two weeks to produce. If you need the fieldwork — primary customer research, reference calls, IP counsel — the assessment tells you precisely which dimensions need it, so you commission targeted hours instead of a full engagement.
Everything in the Public Level, plus: In-depth Assessment
Your data is safe with us. Proprietary materials are used solely to build your assessment — they do not feed into any AI model. All proprietary materials are permanently deleted within 30 days of your engagement ending. Your proprietary data is never sold or shared with third parties. Your assessment report is retained for reference and may contribute to anonymised analysis (for example, identifying patterns across companies). If you re-engage, it serves as your starting point.
Everything in the Proprietary Level, plus a working engagement scoped around what you need — from a single session to multiple sessions across several weeks. The assessment is the foundation; the engagement builds on it to produce whatever the situation requires. We bring the full power of our AI assessment model to achieve results far faster than current approaches deliver.
Everything in the Proprietary Level, plus (among others): Due Diligence Checklist · Commercial strategy · Technical strategy · Product roadmap · Go-to-market strategy · Fundraising strategy · Value gap closure plan · Business case · Pitch narrative · Investor memo
Not sure which level is right for your situation? Start with the public assessment and we'll take it from there.
"Wow, I really didn't expect it to be so powerful. I think I underestimated the power it has. Great product. The Mona Lisa of Internal Knowledge."
— Augustin Petre, CEO, SafeTrace
The system at a glance
Every assessment covers sixteen pillars — from customer evidence and pain specificity to team, moat, and capital efficiency. Nothing is skipped.
Each dimension is graded on a five-level validation scale. The system distinguishes between assumption, anecdote, and proof — and shows exactly what's missing.
Seven independent valuation methods run in parallel — Berkus, Scorecard, Risk Factor Summation, First Chicago, Venture Capital, Comparable Company, and evidence-weighted pillar scoring. Outliers are discarded; the trimmed mean becomes the range.
Five sequential gates determine investment readiness — foundation, positioning, business model, team and moat, and capital strategy. A weak result at any gate blocks progression, regardless of performance elsewhere.
Twenty-two founder archetypes combine into six composite profiles, each with known blind spots and predictable failure patterns. The profile shapes how the assessment interprets what it sees.
Over 500 known structural failure patterns across sixteen categories, screened against every assessment. Tarpits look like good ideas until they aren't — the system flags them early.
Every assessment includes a valuation range with explicit triggers — the specific things that, when proven, move the number up. Not a black box.
One startup or a hundred. The same depth at every scale — without the bottleneck of analyst capacity or the inconsistency of individual judgment.
The startups worth backing don't always look like it.
The ones that do aren't always worth it.
From the blog