The Investability Standard™
The Investability Standard™ is the "ISO for venture." It is a comprehensive, objective, and verifiable framework that measures a venture's operational health, resilience, and readiness for scale.
It was created to solve the fundamental problem identified in our research: the global venture ecosystem runs on subjective, high-friction signals like "gut feel," "pattern matching," and "pedigree." This old model is inefficient, biased, and fails to identify true merit.
The Standard replaces this "subjective nightmare" with a "common language" for the entire ecosystem. It provides a single, data-driven benchmark that allows founders, investors, and ecosystem builders to assess "investability" based on objective proof, not personal bias.
The Core Pillars:
A Framework for Operational Health
The Standard is not a simple checklist. It is a comprehensive diagnostic framework built on five core pillars of operational readiness. A venture's "Investability Score" is determined by its performance and maturity across these interconnected domains.
1. Team & Cultural Health
This pillar assesses the venture's human infrastructure. It moves beyond founder pedigree to measure team alignment, cultural health, role clarity, and the processes for talent management. It validates that the team is a resilient, high-output engine for growth.
2. Market & Thesis Alignment
This pillar measures the venture's strategic clarity. It validates the market size, customer profile, and go-to-market strategy against objective data, ensuring the venture is solving a real, high-value problem, not just performing "circus tricks" for investors.
3. Product & Process Maturity
This pillar audits the venture's "back office." It assesses the maturity of the product roadmap, technical architecture, and internal processes. It ensures the venture is a scalable operation, not a "glorified Google Drive folder" or "spreadsheet mess" at risk of collapse.
4. Operational & Financial Scalability
This pillar stress-tests the venture's engine for growth. It verifies the unit economics, financial model, and operational scalability. It ensures the company's growth is profitable and sustainable, not an "unforced error" waiting to happen.
5. Governance & Legal Health
This pillar ensures the venture is built on a solid foundation. It audits cap table structure, IP ownership, and corporate governance to eliminate the "operational risks" and "liabilities" that kill deals and destroy partnerships.
Governance & Transparency:
Why Trust the Standard?
A standard is only as strong as its credibility. The Investability Standard™ is managed with the rigorous transparency of an institutional-grade framework, ensuring it remains objective, relevant, and free from bias.
How the Standard is Developed
The Standard is not based on opinion. Its initial framework is built from the proprietary data of our Global Venture Efficiency Index, which identified the specific "Structural Frictions" and "operational drags" that cause ventures to fail. It is continuously refined by the real-world, ground-truth data from every audit we perform, making it a living, predictive model of venture success.
Independent Oversight
To ensure objectivity and prevent conflicts of interest, the Standard's evolution is guided by a Standards Advisory Council. This independent body - composed of seasoned VCs, LPs, SFO principals, and data scientists - reviews the methodology, audits changes, and ensures the Standard's primary goal remains the unbiased assessment of merit.
Public Feedback & Evolution
Like all robust standards (W3C, B Lab), this framework is open to public feedback. We actively solicit input from all market participants to identify new risks and opportunities, ensuring the Standard evolves to meet the real-world needs of the ecosystem.
For Strategic Partners (Emerging VCs & Angel Groups)
The Standard is your "instant institutional credibility." 6 We provide the open-source framework for free, allowing you to adopt a turnkey, "ISO-level" diligence process. This ends your "diligence chaos" and signals "institutional-grade credibility" to your LPs at zero cost.
For Ecosystem Builders (Accelerators & Universities)
The Standard is your "credibility engine." Our Ecosystem OS is built around the Standard, allowing you to track your cohort's progress against an objective benchmark and prove your program's value to stakeholders with quantitative data, not just "qualitative stories."