Matching startups with investors is the toughest dating market in the world. Both sides are looking for each other. Neither can tell who is actually available, who is genuinely interested, or who is simply out of reach. We spent six weeks in Silicon Valley trying to make that market a little less blind.
Our Project
Pitchtree has a simple mission that turns out to be a hard one: get good companies in front of the right investors. Not more investors, the right ones. Founders fire off hundreds of cold emails and hear nothing back. Investors get buried in pitches that were never a fit to begin with. Everyone loses time, and the matches that should happen often don’t.
Two things were in the way. The investor database had grown over the years without much structure, so nobody could say for certain which funds were still actively investing. And the website was one long landing page trying to speak to everyone at once, which meant it wasn’t really speaking to anyone.
So we split the job in half. Rebekka took the data, Denis took the website. Six weeks later the two halves met in the middle.
Better data
We cleaned the investor database and normalised every field against an agreed taxonomy, so the records are consistent enough for automated workflows to use. Then we built the enrichment workflow that keeps it that way: it verifies whether a fund has actually been investing recently, separates the active ones from the dormant ones, pulls in their investment theses, and tidies up each new record as it arrives.
The point: only investors who are still writing cheques make it into the matching.
Better visibility
The website went from one landing page to seven pages, each written for one group: founders, accelerators, investors. Every product visual is a real interface instead of a stock photo. Content runs through Sanity, the content management system, so the team can publish without waiting for a developer.
We also built the Investor Tracker, a public directory where every fund gets its own page, set up so that search engines and AI models can read it.
Better data, plus better visibility, equals better matches. That was the formula we kept coming back to whenever we had to decide what mattered.
Our Silicon Valley Experience
The company visits were the part we talk about most. People showed us the real product and the real problems, not a polished pitch. Nobody pretended everything was working. They told us what had failed, what they had thrown away, and what they were trying next, in front of a group of students they had met twenty minutes earlier.
What struck us most was how normal risk is here. Someone mentions a company they founded that did not work out, and then moves straight on to the next sentence. At home that is a story you tell carefully. Here it is just experience, and it clearly changes what people are willing to try.
The other thing is how open everyone is. We asked for meetings we had no real reason to get, and got them. At the Robotics and AI Global Showcase we spent an afternoon in a room full of founders and investors, talking to the kind of people we had been writing about for weeks.
Six weeks is short. It was long enough to notice that the difference is not the technology. It is how quickly people here decide to start.
Project Log
Week 1
Kickoff with Sebastien Torre and Lucien on the provider side. Clarified the goals, the KPIs and how we would work together. Signed the NDA, set up the shared folder, requested access to the GitHub organisation and got the tool stack running. Wrote the project scope covering investor database management, AI automation and content marketing, and agreed it with the provider.
Week 2
Went through the Pitchtree website and its technical foundation. The blog pages were already built but no articles had ever been published. Received administrator access to Sanity and pushed a test article all the way through to check the publishing flow. Started reviewing and cleaning the investor database, and improved the process for verifying investor activity.
Week 3
Finished cleaning and standardising the investor database. Evaluated automation tools for the marketing workflow and agreed the stack for AI assisted content creation and publishing. Put together the list of well known investors that later became the Investor Tracker.
Week 4
Researched and wrote profiles for the top 20 investors and uploaded them to Sanity. Connected Cloudflare and Sanity so content could reach the live site. Rebuilt the layout and visual structure of the Astro landing page. First round of SEO and GEO work across the site and the content, and refined the investment theses in the database.
Week 5
Redesigned the website and finished the blog content. Started listing selected investors publicly on the site. Completed the enrichment workflow for newly added investor records.
Week 6
Added the remaining investors to the site and the database. Wrote the Pitchtree documentation covering how the website is managed and how content gets published, so the team can keep going without us. Prepared and delivered the final presentation.
Project Facts
| Client | Pitchtree, San Francisco, California |
| Project | Investor Database, AI Automation and Website |
| Team | Denis T., Rebekka K. |
| Our contacts | Sebastien Torre and Lucien O. |
| Duration | Six weeks, 13 July to 21 August 2026 |
| Supervision | Christian Schucan and Benjamin Emmenegger, HSLU |
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