Data rooms
Startup data room checklist
A fundraising data room should let an investor answer their standard diligence questions without emailing you. In practice that means eight folders: corporate, cap table and equity, financials, commercial, product and technology, team, legal, and compliance. Completeness matters more than polish — a missing cap table costs more time than an unbranded spreadsheet.
Prepared by Perseids · Published · Updated
The folders
- Corporate: incorporation documents, articles, shareholder agreements, board minutes.
- Cap table and equity: current fully diluted cap table, option plan, grant register, SAFEs and notes with terms.
- Financials: historical accounts, management accounts, current model, budget vs actual.
- Commercial: customer list or cohort summary, pipeline, key contracts, churn and retention data.
- Product and technology: roadmap, architecture overview, IP ownership, third-party dependencies.
- Team: org chart, key employment contracts, founder agreements.
- Legal: material contracts, disputes, insurance, IP registrations.
- Compliance: data protection posture, regulatory permissions where relevant, security overview.
What to leave out at first
- Named individual salary data before it is asked for.
- Customer personal data — summarise instead.
- Anything covered by a third-party confidentiality restriction you have not cleared.
Operational hygiene
- One document per question, clearly named and dated.
- Access granted per recipient, not one link for everyone.
- NDA gating where the material warrants it.
- Watermarking on the most sensitive documents.
- Remove access when a process ends.
Prepared by Perseids for general information. It is not legal, tax or investment advice — confirm your specific situation with your advisers.
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