Poach

About Poach

Poach is a curated intelligence platform designed for venture capitalists and early-stage investors seeking a decisive edge in deal sourcing. In a landscape saturated with cold inbound pitches and reliant on warm introductions, Poach provides a superior, predictive signal. It operates on a simple but powerful premise: by tracking the social media activity of top-tier VCs—specifically who they follow on Twitter—it can identify promising founders long before they officially enter a fundraising process. This detection occurs in the critical, stealth-mode phase, offering investors a quality lead that sits perfectly between a warm intro and cold outreach. The platform enriches this raw signal with proprietary LinkedIn matching and AI-powered analysis, delivering clean, actionable data directly to your inbox daily. For investment teams focused on quality over quantity, Poach transforms passive observation into a systematic strategy for expanding and winning dealflow.

Features of Poach

VC Social Tracking

Poach's core engine continuously monitors the Twitter follows of a curated list of top-tier venture capitalists. These follows are not random; they are often early signals of interest in emerging founders, researchers, or operators. By automating this surveillance, Poach captures the earliest digital footprints of potential investment opportunities, providing a foundational dataset that is otherwise manually intensive and easy to miss.

Identity Resolution & Enrichment

The platform employs proprietary technology to match Twitter profiles with corresponding LinkedIn accounts. This critical step moves beyond anonymous handles, enriching each record with verified professional history, educational background, and current roles. This fusion of social and professional data creates a comprehensive profile, turning a username into a fully contextualized potential lead.

AI-Powered Categorization

Using advanced AI, Poach analyzes the combined Twitter and LinkedIn data to automatically label each individual. It categorizes people into specific, actionable segments such as "founder," "funded," "engineering," "research," or "investor." This intelligent tagging allows users to instantly filter and prioritize leads based on their specific investment thesis, such as finding unfunded technical founders.

Curated Data Delivery

Users receive processed intelligence directly via a daily email digest. This includes an executive summary of new leads and a detailed CSV attachment containing all enriched data, labels, and AI-written bios. The delivery is designed for efficiency, providing everything needed to act in a clean, exportable format without requiring constant platform login.

Use Cases of Poach

Identifying Stealth-Mode Founders

The primary use case is for seed and pre-seed VCs to discover founders operating in stealth, often months before they publicly announce a fundraise. By filtering for the "founder" label while excluding the "funded" label, investors can build a targeted list of very early-stage entrepreneurs to engage with at the point of maximum leverage and relationship-building.

Thesis-Driven Founder Sourcing

Investors with a specific focus—such as AI researchers, ex-FAANG engineers, or PhDs transitioning to entrepreneurship—can use Poach's AI labels to surgically find these profiles. This allows for highly tailored outreach that demonstrates genuine understanding and aligns with a fund's specialized domain expertise.

Competitive Dealflow Intelligence

Teams can use Poach to monitor which founders are attracting attention from specific, respected competing investors. Seeing that a founder is being followed by a known top-tier VC partner serves as a powerful validation signal, prompting timely and informed engagement to get ahead in a competitive deal.

Building a Proprietary Outreach Pipeline

Beyond immediate deals, investment professionals can use the daily CSV exports to systematically build and maintain a proprietary pipeline of talent. This ongoing stream of enriched data serves as a long-term resource for sourcing future hires, co-founders for portfolio companies, or angel investment opportunities.

Frequently Asked Questions

How does Poach find these founders?

Poach identifies potential founders by algorithmically tracking who a curated list of established, top-tier venture capitalists follow on Twitter. A VC following an individual is often a leading indicator of interest. Poach then enriches these Twitter profiles with LinkedIn data and uses AI to analyze the combined information, labeling individuals who exhibit founder characteristics.

What kind of data do I receive?

Subscribers receive a daily email containing two key components. First, an executive summary highlighting new and notable leads. Second, a comprehensive CSV file attachment with the full dataset, including Twitter handles, full names, LinkedIn URLs, the VC who followed them, AI-generated labels, and a concise bio.

Can I filter for specific types of founders?

Absolutely. The AI-powered labels are designed for precise filtering. You can filter the provided CSV data on any combination of labels. A common and powerful filter is to search for rows labeled "founder" but NOT labeled "funded" to isolate early-stage, pre-funding entrepreneurs.

How current is the information?

The platform provides daily updates. The system continuously monitors VC Twitter activity and processes new data, delivering a fresh batch of enriched leads to your inbox every morning. This ensures you are acting on a near-real-time signal.