Investors database

Startups which are fundraising founders need to do thorough research on which investors they require to learn more about them. This implies to identify the investors’ areas of interest, their investment history and the portfolio companies and to compare them with the investment needs of your company to assess their suitability. The investors’ database will help you search, identify and get in touch with investors with interests matching your needs.

Search criteria

Go to the Radar section of the main Bridge menu on the left, unfold it and click on the “Investor database” option. You can explore the database by typing a word in the text box for a textual search, you can select one of the most popular searches appearing below the text box (by clicking the tag you want to search) or you can use one or more of the available search criteria:

• Type: depending on the nature of their activity investors can be accelerators, pre-seed investors, etc. If you are addressing a particular type (or types) of investors, check the types of investor you are looking for.
• Focus: some investors may have a particular interest in a specific domain (sectorial) or a given technology. Select one or more criteria to filter those who are interested in your activity area.
• Stages: you can identify the investors that are interested in a specific stage of the funding rounds. Select one or more criteria to filter those who are seeking to invest in the stages that your company is.
• Geography: select one or more countries to filter the investors depending on the geographic area they cover.
• Leads rounds: not all the investors lead all the funding rounds they take part in. If you are looking for investors’ that will lead the funding round, select the corresponding criteria.
• Check size: filter the investors on the typical size of their investment tickets.

Search results

As you adjust your search criteria, the list of results will dinamically adapt. You can see the number of hit retrieved just abouve the first result, so that you can refine your search to find a balance between your criteria and the size of this list os results that you are willing to review. The investor cards in the list are ordered on relevance basis.

Click on the name of each investor to see their profile. You will find there a brief description of the company, some basic details, images, metrics and, more important, their investment thesis and preference and their porfolio highlights. Additionally, you will be able to identify their preferred way to be contacted and the team members (if they included any).

Beneath the basic data of the investor, there is a black “Get in touch” button. By clicking on it, you will be offered 2 options: send a message and send a pitch. The fist option will trigger a plain email message within OnePass Bridge. Check the article “Sharing your pitch” for more detaisl about the second.

:::info If you activated the OnePass Pipeline feature, the button “Add to pipeline” will appear on the right upper corner of each investor card. This button will help you add investors to your pipeline. :::

Funding opportunities

If you are open to consider other funding opportunities, this section will help you identify cascade funding open calls, acceleration programmes, vouchers, etc. that are open to startups.

This funding opportunities usually offer financial (commonly implemented as a lump sum), technical and/or business support, linked to the development of a pilot or demostration project, an experiment or a technology solution. These opportunities are usually open to a specific group of applicants fulfilling some eligibility criteria and for activities with an specific purpose.

Search criteria

Go to the Radar section of the main OnePass Bridge menu on the left, unfold it and click on the “Funding opportunities” option. You can use the text search, select a popular searches appearing below the text box (by clicking the tag you want to search) or you can use one or more of the available search criteria:

• Funding type: filter the opportunities by the nature of the funding they offer:

  • Public / Equity-free funding: under this category you will find “cascade funding” (aka Financial Support for Third Parties -FSTP-). This is the funding opportunities that granted projects by the EC offer to third parties to support innovation, uptake of new technologies, develop pilots or experiments, etc.
  • Acceleration / Incubation programmes: here you will find traditional acceleration programmes (those which may take some equity in exchange for acceleration) and incubation services (those which offer knowledge or services to support the creation of new ventures) that are sponsored or managed by public bodies.
  • Other opportunities: these are referring to opportunities that may not offer funding but are related to them, e.g., open calls to select early adopters willing to uptake funded technology development, calls for expression of interest to support funded projects with innovation services, calls for experts, etc.
  • Private funds: under this category you may find initiatives promoted by private entities, including those from corporates, technology funds, etc.

• Status: select opportunities as per their application submission period:

  • Open for applications: these are opportunities whose application period is active (i.e., those can still be applied for).
  • Coming soon: this is forthcoming opportunities (those which have not launched yet, but will do it soon).
  • Closed: application period is over. It’s a log of past opportunities that can help you understand, e.g., which other topics or projects were funded before to understand the state-of-the-art.
  • Always open: this is used for opportunities that will be active for a long period (e.g., as long as the programme sponsoring them is active) and/or will be assessed and granted on a “first come, first served” basis.

• Beneficiary type and size: use these criteria to find opportunities that a specific type of organization can apply for. The possibilities are:

  • Individuals, for natural persons, be it an expert, an ambassador, a researcher or an entrepreneur.
  • Self-employed and Sole proprietorships, is referring to those one-person companies, which are carrying out business activity but might not be registered as a company and might not have employees.
  • Private companies, this means all privately held companies of any size, as soon as they are registered as a legal entity.
  • Non-profit organizations, including associations, federations, civil society organizations… any whose activity is not oriented to obtaining economic benefits.
  • Research and technology organizations are private or public research centres or technology transfer/promotion organizations, in any thematic subdomain.
  • Academia, this is particularly addressing universities, colleges and any other secondary or tertiary higher learning institution for the teaching, studying, and scientific work.
  • Public Company is used for organizations which are partially or totally sustained by public funds.
  • Government agency refers to public bodies which are part of a national, regional or local government. Docs of these could be: a regional development agency or a public organization for the promotion of a given technology.
  • Consortia is group of companies that apply together to a scheme. This is not a legal person and, hence, is usually represented by a coordinator
  • Partnerships are legal arrangements that allows two or more organizations to share responsibility for a project or business.
  • Other.

  A note: in those cases of compounded entities (e.g., consortia or partnerships), the requirements related to their composition (if any) to apply for a particular opportunity will be detailed in the opportunity description. The size criteria can be used to filter the applicants targeted by the opportunity in case they include restrictions with this regard (e.g. those targeted to SMEs, midcaps, etc.)

• Industries and technologies: you can use these to identify those opportunities which are targeting a specific sector (i.e. activity area or subarea) or promoting the use of a specific technology. They are tag-based criteria: this means, you can select one or more from the list shown or you can start typing (in English!) to get suggestions of the closest existing tags to the word you want to use.

You can use these criteria individually or combine them in a search:

• In the text box, type a text string (a part of a word, a complete word or a group of them) to retrieve the opportunities that contain those characters in its name or tagline and / or,
• Simply click on the check box of the categories that you want to select, for the rest of the filters.

On the right of each category, you can find the number of opportunities linked to it. This number will be dynamically adapting to the combination of criteria as you search.

You can remove a tag from your combination by unmarking the category in the corresponding list of filters or by clicking the cross in the tag at the begining of the list. On the contrary, if you want to remove a text string, you will need to delete it manually. It is also possible to remove all your search criteria in one click: simply click the reset filters button on the right just above the first result of the list.

The search results list

In the case of the funding opportunities, each item in the results list will be shown as a card including:

• the title of the opportunity,
• a tagline,
• the initial lines of its overview,
• the industry or technology tags assigned and
• the deadline before which application must be submitted.

You will see the number of opportunities retrieved just above the list and you can sort them by relevance, opening date or deadline by selecting one of those options in the drop-down box above the first result of the list. You can review a summary of each opportunity just by clicking on the “Know more” button in the bottom right corner of each result or, simply, on the title.

The watchlist and other lists