Investment Thesis Stress-Testing: Initial Screening

Investment firms regularly receive decks, enquiries, and proposals from entrepreneurs, startups, scale-ups, and investment brokers. Not every opportunity that lands on your desk deserves a full review, so this service provides a fast, disciplined initial screen that stress-tests each proposal against your firm's core criteria, so you can quickly and confidently decide how much further time and resource it deserves.

Evaluate against Key Criteria: Rapidly evaluate opportunities against the investment firm's core criteria and eliminate misaligned targets.
High-Level Assessment: Review the pitch deck and evaluate a number of parameters and metrics against investment criteria.
The "Pass or Proceed" Decision: Decide whether to reject the deal outright, request more information, or advance the opportunity to a formal initial meeting or preliminary due diligence.

Project examples of 'initial screening'

Request: Screen an inbound investment proposal from a healthtech scale-up against the fund's core criteria before committing to a first meeting.
Output: A structured screening memo assessing the opportunity against the fund's investment criteria, with a clear pass, proceed, or request-more-information recommendation.
Client impact: The client, an early-growth investment firm, used the memo to decline the opportunity within 48 hours, freeing the team to focus on two better-aligned deals already in the pipeline.

Request: Assess a broker-introduced manufacturing business against the fund's investment mandate ahead of a first management meeting.
Output: A high-level screening note flagging the target's fit against the fund's sector, size, and growth criteria, with key questions for the first meeting.
Client impact: The client, a mid-market PE firm, entered the first meeting with a clear line of questioning that surfaced a material customer concentration risk early.