RA Capital

Please send us an email to request@racap.com that includes a non-confidential slide deck and a cover email.

If you know a member of the RA Capital team, you are welcome to email your materials to them directly; if they aren’t the best person to lead diligence, they will forward your note to our hub team (request@racap.com) to ensure the right colleague follows up.

Your email and slides will be assessed by those of our colleagues we believe have the expertise to best understand what you are working on. Our goal is to make sure that we don’t overlook what’s uniquely important about your venture and technology and therefore assign the right people to engage in diligence.

We review all emails carefully and almost always accept a request to meet if your work is related to areas we invest in. You can expect a reply within three business days, though we strive to reply same day.


request@racap.com

A peek into our process:

If we haven’t met a company before, we don’t invest after a single meeting - we conduct deep diligence in stages, often pulling in more members of our team as we figure out what questions are critical to a decision. We can often also do our work via zoom just as well as in person, so there’s no need to hold up diligence to try to do everything in person.

We try to keep our first meeting to non-confidential information, and use it to generate an overview to share with our broader team to determine the right people for a second meeting. If applicable, we may also sign a CDA or request data room access. After our second meeting, we typically have a good sense of what it will take to get to an investment decision.

When time is of the essence, we can do this all in a week or two. Our efficiency stems from having a team with the right people with the right expertise to assess almost any venture and get to the crux of what makes a company special. To that end, we may rely on TechAtlas associates with specialized knowledge to take a first meeting, though senior members of the investment team are always involved in the process.

While a lot of our questions may start off about the technology, data, and business model, the closer we get to an investment decision, the more we’ll want to get to know your team as well at a personal level, especially if we’re talking about leading a round and joining the board.

A word on titles vs expertise:

Management teams typically want to meet the people who have the authority to make investment decisions, but we actually only want those people to make such decisions when they are well-informed. To get them involved, we have a process that involves many more members of our team, some of whom may not have senior titles but whose judgment is vital to our decision-making.

We hate the possibility of our diligence resulting in a false-negative… of failing to invest in a great company. We recognize that an uninformed decision-maker may wrongly say “no”, especially if pressed for time. That’s why we only want our decision-makers to make decisions when they are well-informed.

We never want to pass on a great company, and that’s why we have the TechAtlas team. They don’t make the decisions to invest in companies but they advocate on behalf of companies to ensure that the investment team invests their time and effort where it’s needed. TechAtlas associates help their investment colleagues understand the context of every new venture, e.g., competitive landscape, historical data sets in its field, technical challenges, relevant business models etc.

The majority of investments we make start with the right associate taking that first meeting, and it’s precisely because we respect your time that we maintain our deep bench of associates with critical expertise in relevant fields.

Any TA associate you meet has carefully studied your space and technology and mapped your competitive landscape. Our senior decision-makers will tell you they don’t originate conviction in anything without relying on TechAtlas insights.

We often ask associates to lead the first meeting with a new company when the company or context is unfamiliar to the investment team or if the investment team member with relevant knowledge can’t be scheduled promptly. Associates then inform the team’s decision about whether to request a second meeting and what direction to take diligence. Once up to speed, associates help set you up for success because they help our team “get it”, ensure your meetings with decision-makers are productive, and reduce the chances of a false-negative investment decision.

We ask associates to lead meetings, sometimes solo, when we feel they are ready. Many are awesome at this from the start while others need more practice, but in the grand scheme of life, we’re all learning and mentoring each other to be better. If you feel an associate doesn’t understand something about your proposition, please be kind and take the time to help them get it: today’s associates are tomorrow's decision-makers. We notice and appreciate executives who engage effectively with our more junior colleagues.

Interestingly, many investors would affirm that when a CEO or CFO shows displeasure at meeting someone they perceive as “low-ranking”, this correlates highly with an inability to tolerate dissent and is a top predictor of the kind of toxic culture that leads to turnover and failure.

Two-way Dialogue:

We appreciate your time and what you are teaching us about your field and company. We are happy to share what we know and are able to share. Ask us about financing strategy, product development strategy, policy, etc… we will do our best to help even if we aren’t yet invested in your company. We consider all companies to have the potential to someday be in our portfolio and, besides, we’re all trying to make the world better. And it’s a small world - that the good one does tends to come around eventually.

Keep in mind that our TechAtlas associates are quite likely to have a boatload of expertise relevant to what you do. Ask a TechAtlas associate for their perspective on a space, they will likely surprise you with their knowledge of your landscape, relevant data sets, and all kinds of complexities. That’s because they have probably really focused on your space. Our senior people are torn in a thousand different directions, but our associates are encouraged to focus and go deep in a few areas. And as we said, we assign the right person to each diligence project, so the associate you talk to is likely to have had many months to study just your market and technology before meeting you, and they have likely prepared well for your meeting. So mine them for insights.

Also, we put out a lot of useful content on our website, RApport.bio, and Gateway.racap.com, so check those out.