AI and a small industry of fundraising consultants have made the polished deck, the fluent answer and the model that miraculously checks out completely commoditised. None of that ever measured founder quality especially well. Now it barely measures it at all. nVested is built to find out what's underneath.
10 behavioural domains · 20 minutes · one score you can actually compare
A great pitch deck used to take real skill — or a friend who had some. A model that survived real scrutiny took genuine command of the numbers. Both were rare, and that rarity was the point: a founder who could produce them was probably good for something else too.
That correlation is gone. Every founder now has access to AI, or an agency that will build the deck and model the numbers for a fee or a cut of whatever gets raised, or both — so the deck is polished, the numbers check out, and the objection-handling is smooth, rehearsed, like everyone else's, against the same set of questions. None of it is illegal. It's just stopped telling you anything about the founder. Grade inflation, for pitch decks.
So the diligence question isn't "does the pitch hold up" — everyone's pitch holds up now. It's what's underneath it, which is exactly what a good pitch is designed not to show you.
nVested is not a personality quiz. Personality quizzes are easy — that's exactly their flaw. You don't need to have raised a round to know which box makes you look good; you just need to be a person who's ever filled out a form.
So we built the opposite: a set of questions engineered so that knowing the impressive-sounding answer doesn't actually help you, plus one question we never algorithmically score at all. That last one exists purely to hand you a specific, checkable story — something you can bring up again, unprompted, a few weeks later, and see if it still holds. We won't publish the mechanics behind either — that's rather the point.
A founder can perform confidence for forty-five minutes. It's much harder to fake recall. A real memory comes with specific, slightly odd detail that was never chosen for effect — that's what makes it stick. A story that was never actually lived has to be rebuilt from scratch each time you ask about it, and rebuilding is where the details start to move.
Everything that actually predicts whether a term sheet ages well.
A founder who is who they say they are will happily give you twenty minutes. One who isn't will find a reason not to — and that, too, is diligence.
nVested is currently onboarding a small number of funds ahead of general availability.
We'll never dress up a founder who scored badly as "a diamond in the rough." That's what the coffee meeting is for.