Poach

About Poach

Poach is a dealflow intelligence platform that provides investors with a critical early signal on promising founders. It operates by tracking the social media activity of top-tier venture capitalists, specifically who they follow on platforms like Twitter. These follows are analyzed as a leading indicator of VC interest, often occurring months before a founder officially begins a fundraising process. Poach then enriches this raw signal with professional data from LinkedIn and uses AI to categorize individuals, delivering a structured, actionable list of potential investment opportunities. The core value proposition is providing a quality of lead that sits between a warm introduction and a cold inbound—highly relevant, pre-vetted, and early. It is designed for venture capital firms, angel investors, and other investment professionals who need to identify and connect with high-potential founders before their rounds become competitive, effectively expanding and de-risking their dealflow sourcing.

Features of Poach

VC Social Tracking

Poach continuously monitors the Twitter accounts of selected venture capitalists to see who they newly follow. This activity is a powerful, non-public signal of early interest in individuals, often founders still in stealth mode or building in public, providing users with a first-mover advantage in deal sourcing.

LinkedIn Enrichment & Identity Resolution

The platform employs proprietary technology to match discovered Twitter profiles with corresponding LinkedIn accounts. This process enriches each lead with verified professional data, including work history, education, and career trajectory, turning a social handle into a comprehensive professional profile.

AI-Powered Categorization & Labeling

An AI system analyzes the combined Twitter and LinkedIn data to automatically label each person with relevant tags such as "founder," "engineering," "funded," or "research." This allows for immediate filtering and prioritization based on your specific investment thesis and criteria.

Raw Data Delivery via CSV & Digest

Poach delivers results in a practical, flexible format. Users receive a daily email digest with executive summaries and a full CSV export containing all tracked individuals, their enriched data, AI labels, and bios. This enables easy integration into existing workflows and CRM systems.

Use Cases of Poach

Identifying Stealth-Mode Founders

Early-stage VCs use Poach to filter for individuals labeled as "founder" but not "funded." This directly surfaces founders who are building companies but have not yet raised institutional capital, allowing for outreach months before a formal seed round.

Building a Thematic Pipeline

Investors focused on specific sectors (e.g., AI, web3, biotech) can use the AI labels and bio information to quickly identify individuals whose background and current work align with their thesis, streamlining the creation of a targeted outreach list.

Competitive Intelligence & Tracking

Firms can track which founders competing VC funds are showing early interest in. This provides insight into competitor focus areas and can alert your firm to promising opportunities you may have otherwise missed in your network.

Sourcing Non-Traditional Talent

Beyond founders, recruiters and investors can use Poach to find top-tier technical, product, or research talent who are gaining traction in the public sphere, useful for portfolio company recruiting or spotting future founder potential.

Frequently Asked Questions

How does Poach get its data?

Poach analyzes public social data. It tracks the public "following" actions of VCs on Twitter and matches those accounts to public LinkedIn profiles using identity resolution technology. All data is sourced from publicly available information.

What makes Poach's signal valuable?

The signal is valuable because it is early and high-intent. A VC following a founder on social media is a deliberate action that often precedes an investment conversation by months. It is a stronger signal than general online activity but appears before any formal fundraising begins.

What do the AI labels mean?

The AI labels categorize a person's primary professional role or status based on their bios and work history. Examples include "founder" (current startup founder), "funded" (has raised significant capital), "engineering," "product," and "research." These allow for precise filtering.

How is the data delivered?

Data is delivered daily via email. The email includes a brief summary of new leads and a direct link to download a CSV file. The CSV contains all relevant data points: Twitter handle, full name, LinkedIn URL, who followed them, AI labels, and a generated bio.