A strong pitch deck barely matters if you don’t already know someone who plays golf with the right investor.
A founder told researchers that sentiment, and it captures what Jenny Flores watched for two decades from the other side of the table, where access and relationships could shape which founders got in the room and how they were evaluated.
When founders have difficulty identifying which investors are likely to consider their businesses, fundraising can require more time and effort, while opportunities to develop investor relationships may be missed.
Flores spent more than 20 years in banking and impact investing, including managing a $420 million impact investment fund at Wells Fargo. The criteria investors used to assess companies were familiar to people with years of experience in finance or venture capital, but often less visible to founders without that background.
She eventually left corporate finance and founded Amplifying Markets for Her (AMH) Catalyst Center with early funding from the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth. That included building Capital Passport, a tool that gives founders a way to assess their pitch materials against criteria used in investor evaluation.
AMH examined that gap in research it conducted with the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies in 2025, including a survey of 992 small-business owners, 501 women and 491 men, along with eight national focus groups with 19 women entrepreneurs exploring their experiences navigating funding.
Sixty-three percent of women who had pursued venture capital reported encountering gender bias in the process, and 74% said they couldn’t easily tell which investors were worth approaching. Among men surveyed, one in three said they rarely or never struggled to reach an investor, compared with fewer than one in 10 women.
The consequences extend beyond a more difficult fundraising process. When founders have difficulty identifying which investors are likely to consider their businesses, fundraising can require more time and effort, while opportunities to develop investor relationships may be missed. In a venture market where access often determines who gets into the room and who gets introduced to the next investor, those differences can compound over time.
The imbalance showed up in the way founders described the process itself. One told researchers that “the moving of the goalposts” was among her biggest hurdles to pitching because she could never get “just that one last piece.”
Participants described conflicting feedback, repeated deck revisions and uncertainty about what investors wanted to see.
Making investor expectations visible
The free Capital Passport was designed to give founders a standardized way to assess those expectations by scoring a founder’s pitch deck across ten criteria, covering market size, business model, team, traction, go-to-market strategy, financial readiness and narrative clarity.
A score above seven signals that AMH has enough information and evidence in the deck to begin evaluating potential investor matches. Those founders can then enter AMH’s investor review process, where the team compares their businesses with participating investors’ criteria before making introductions. Founders below that line receive feedback and referrals intended to address areas identified in the assessment.
A lower score does not mean a company is not venture-backable, just as a higher score does not guarantee funding. Investors ultimately make their own decisions based on their theses, diligence and assessment of the opportunity.
Venture capital’s business model depends on identifying promising companies before their value is obvious to the broader market, but when relationships, referrals or inconsistent signals shape which opportunities receive serious consideration, some companies may never reach the stage at which an investor evaluates them.
That makes the funding gap an information and evaluation problem as much as a capital problem. Capital Passport uses the same assessment for founders regardless of how they reach AMH or whether they have existing relationships in venture capital.
What an assessment can’t change
A common assessment may make the initial evaluation process more consistent, but it cannot eliminate the discretion or bias that can influence investment decisions.
Investors still bring their own thesis, risk tolerance, sector expertise and judgment to every opportunity and decide for themselves what is worth backing.
During Capital Passport’s beta, one founder revised her materials after completing the assessment and later closed a $100,000 investment round following an introduction. Among the 100 founders who tested the platform, AMH reports that all said the assessment gave them greater clarity about their businesses, priorities or competitive positioning.
“Founders shouldn’t have to decode venture capital by collecting rejections,” Flores said. “We do founders a disservice when we pretend every fundraising journey starts from the same place. Bias and pattern recognition exist, and warm introductions matter.”
AMH updates the scoring model using feedback from investors and founders along with market data, allowing the evaluation to reflect changing expectations around growth, profitability, valuations and capital efficiency.
The next phase is about data as much as growth, as AMH tracks how founders and investors respond to the evaluations and whether more companies go on to raise capital.
If Capital Passport does what Flores built it to do, the founder who hears that a good pitch deck matters less than knowing the right person will at least know, long before she walks into the room, exactly where she stands.
