Frequently asked questions

Astel matches your company against 80,000+ verified investors and gives each one a match score, based on more than 25 criteria such as sector, stage, location and investor type, showing how likely they are to be interested in you. It also shows investors who have looked at deals like yours before, investors that you, your advisors or your investors have worked or studied with, and investors within driving distance if you want to meet in person. You can filter further, for example to investors who have written about fintech in their newsletters.

Astel analyses the LinkedIn profiles of your team and advisors and shows every investor you share a connection with: someone who worked at the same company, studied at the same university or already knows one of you. Each connection comes with a match score, so you can see which introductions matter most. Pick the investor you want to meet and Astel writes the introduction email for you, ready to edit and send from your own email.

Upload your pitch deck, plus any other files such as your cap table, financials or business plan, and Astel produces a detailed 40-page report within an hour. It scores your company on seven criteria: market need, market size, innovation, defensibility, scalability, traction and team. It goes through your deck page by page, saying what to fix, how urgent it is and how much it affects your score, maps your competitors, and lists the risks investors are likely to raise. You can then ask the report questions directly.

Yes. Astel's Fundraising Autopilot is a conversational AI co-pilot: you type what you need in plain language and its AI agents do the work. For example, ask which investors from our live investor meetings fit your deal best, have it score your deck section by section, draft a three-step email sequence to your top 10 matched investors, or summarise your recent investor meetings and tell you who to follow up with. Answers draw on your own data and on Astel's investor data, including live investor meetings, newsletters and podcasts.

Yes. Astel has an MCP (Model Context Protocol) connection. Add Astel's MCP server as a connector in Claude or any other MCP-capable tool, sign in to approve access, and you can find matching investors, run due diligence or draft outreach without leaving your AI tool. The connection uses standard OAuth, so you can revoke access at any time.

Astel is a proprietary, middle-layer LLM fine-tuned for investment banking and corporate finance. It learns from live investor conversations with 100+ investment professionals and runs every step of a raise: matching across 80,000+ verified investors, warm introductions, investor-readiness analysis, outreach and CRM. Founders using Astel have raised $228M from Pre-Seed to Series B rounds.

Three groups: startups and scaleups raising their own round, corporate finance and advisory firms running deals for clients, and accelerators and incubators supporting a cohort. Firms and accelerators can run Astel under their own brand.

For startups and scaleups, $150 gives you the complete platform with 15 credits to spend across it. There is no subscription and nothing renews automatically: when your credits run out, you top up. Pricing for corporate finance firms and accelerators is agreed per mandate or per programme.

A warm introduction is an intro to an investor through someone who already knows them, rather than a cold email. Warm intros get far better responses because the investor trusts the person making the introduction. Astel maps your team, advisors and existing investors against target funds to surface 500–1,000+ possible introduction paths.

Yes. Astel is the platform built by Astel Ventures Limited, and astelventures.com is its home.

It is an AI investment banking platform that runs under your firm's brand, logo and domain, so clients experience it as your own product. Astel provides the investor database, due diligence engine and outreach automation underneath. It works as another analyst on the deal — available around the clock, across every mandate at once.

You walk into every pitch able to show investor matches and a readiness analysis the client's other advisors cannot produce. No other boutique or bulge-bracket firm can offer a white-label AI corporate finance analyst as part of their service, so the depth and turnaround you can demonstrate becomes the reason a client picks you.

A 40-page investor-readiness assessment on any company you are mandated on, produced in under an hour rather than the two to three days it normally takes. It scores the business across investor criteria, benchmarks it against its industry and flags the questions investors will raise.

Pricing is custom and agreed per mandate rather than per raise. Fees are pre-agreed and locked in through the platform, which creates a new success-fee revenue line on every raise your clients complete. Book a walkthrough and we will scope it against your mandate pipeline.

No. The platform carries your firm's identity throughout — your brand, your logo, your colours — and clients reach it at your own URL. To the client it is your product, built by your firm, and every closed round builds your firm's track record rather than a vendor's.

It is a fundraising platform that runs entirely under your accelerator's brand, logo and domain, so your cohort experiences it as your own product rather than a third-party tool. Astel provides the investor database, readiness analysis and outreach automation underneath, while every closed round builds your programme's track record instead of a vendor's.

Every company in the programme gets a 40-page investor-readiness assessment in under an hour, access to a database of institutional investors, and automated warm-introduction mapping and outreach. Founders who would otherwise pay outside advisors for this work get it built into your programme, which lifts the funding rate across the whole cohort rather than just the strongest one or two companies.

Pricing is custom and agreed per programme rather than per raise, because cohort size and the level of support vary. Book a walkthrough and we will scope it against your programme. For founders, the work is included at no extra cost to them — typically saving each startup $10,000 or more in outside advisory fees.

Yes. The platform runs under your identity throughout — your brand, your logo, your colours and your own domain. To your cohort it is your product. Nothing in the experience points to Astel, so every capital raise and every founder testimonial accrues to your programme's reputation.

A 30-minute walkthrough covers the platform running under your brand and what launching for your next cohort involves. Because the analysis and outreach run themselves, you can support a larger cohort without hiring additional analysts.