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Gantt Chart for Startup Fundraising

Map your Seed or Series A fundraise on a Gantt chart — from materials prep and investor outreach through due diligence, term sheet, and close.

Gantt Chart for Startup Fundraising

Raising a venture round is a project with a deadline: your runway. Most founders treat fundraising as a continuous, formless activity — reaching out when it feels right, following up when they remember, drafting materials between meetings. That approach routinely takes 6–9 months and exhausts the team. Treating fundraising as a managed project with a Gantt chart, defined phases, and weekly progress tracking cuts that to 8–16 weeks and gives you something rare: a process you control.

This guide covers the key phases of a startup equity fundraising Gantt for Seed and Series A rounds.

Phase 1: Pre-Process Preparation

The most common mistake founders make is starting investor outreach before they are ready. Meeting a great investor when your materials are unpolished, your data room is incomplete, or your narrative is inconsistent is a wasted opportunity. That investor has seen you at less than your best, and a second meeting is harder to get than a first.

Give preparation 2–4 weeks and do it before you take any meetings. Key deliverables:

Pitch deck: The standard VC pitch deck is 12–18 slides covering problem, solution, market size (TAM/SAM/SOM), product, business model, traction, team, financials, ask and use of funds. Every slide should be able to stand alone. The deck will be forwarded within firms without you in the room — it must work without narration.

Financial model: A 3-year forward model showing revenue drivers, unit economics (LTV, CAC, payback period), headcount plan, and key assumptions. Investors will stress-test your assumptions; know your model well enough to defend every line.

Data room: A shared folder (Docsend, Notion, Google Drive with link tracking) containing:

  • Certificate of incorporation and any amendments
  • Cap table (fully diluted, including option pool and any convertible notes or SAFEs)
  • Key customer contracts (redacted for confidentiality)
  • IP assignments from founders to the company
  • Employee agreements (NDAs, invention assignment agreements)
  • Prior round documents if applicable
  • Last 12 months of financial statements

A clean, organized data room signals that you run a tight operation. An incomplete or disorganized data room signals the opposite.

Narrative refinement: Distill your story to a single paragraph you can say in 2 minutes. Then distill it to one sentence. If you cannot articulate why this company will be enormous in one sentence, investors will not be able to articulate it to their partners when they champion your deal internally.

Phase 2: Investor Targeting and Intro Mapping

Build a target list of 100–150 investors before you start any outreach. Filter by:

  • Stage: Does this firm lead Seed rounds? Series A? Do they do both?
  • Check size: Is your target raise within their typical check range?
  • Sector: Do they invest in your category? Portfolio concentration in your sector is good (they understand the space) or bad (they have a conflict) — know which.
  • Geography: Many firms have preferences on geography; remote-first firms are more flexible.

For each investor, map your warm introduction paths: which of your advisors, angels, or portfolio founder friends can introduce you? A warm intro converts at 3–5x the rate of cold outreach. Use LinkedIn, AngelList, and your existing investor network to find paths to your top 30 targets.

This research takes 1–2 weeks and is worth every hour.

Phase 3: First-Wave Outreach

Launch outreach in a coordinated wave, not a trickle. The goal is to have all your first meetings within a 3-week window, which creates competitive pressure and prevents the process from dragging. Investors move faster when they sense momentum; momentum is easier to create when you have parallel conversations in flight.

  • Tier 1 intros first: Contact your intro sources for your top 15–20 targets before going broader.
  • Expect 50% non-response: From cold outreach, expect 50% of investors to never respond. From warm intros, expect 15–30% non-response. Build your list accordingly.
  • Track everything: Use a simple CRM (Notion, Airtable, or a spreadsheet) to log every outreach, intro, response, and meeting. You will lose track otherwise.

Phase 4: First Meetings

The first meeting is a pitch meeting, typically 30–60 minutes, in-person or video. Your goal is not to get a term sheet in the first meeting. Your goal is to get the second meeting.

The standard first meeting structure:

  1. Quick founder intros (30 seconds each — the meeting is about the company, not your bio)
  2. Company overview and traction (10 minutes)
  3. Market opportunity (5 minutes)
  4. Product demo or walkthrough (10 minutes)
  5. Q&A (15–20 minutes)
  6. Investor's process and timeline (5 minutes)

After the meeting: send a follow-up email within 24 hours summarizing the conversation and including any materials you discussed sending. This signals that you are organized and responsive — qualities investors are evaluating throughout the process.

Phase 5: Second Meetings and Partner Meetings

If a VC firm is interested, they will schedule follow-up conversations that go deeper on the areas they care most about:

  • Team meeting: Additional partner or associate meets the team (technical founder if they haven't met, other co-founders).
  • Customer reference calls: Investor wants to speak with 2–3 of your customers directly. Have a short list of enthusiastic customers who can take a 20-minute call.
  • Financial deep-dive: Investor goes through your model in detail with you.
  • Partner meeting: The full partnership (all partners at the firm) hears your pitch. This is the highest-stakes meeting in the process. Prepare for hard questions and dissenting opinions — you need to win the room, not just the champion.

The partner meeting typically happens 2–4 weeks after the first meeting at a well-run firm. At slower firms it can take 6–8 weeks.

Phase 6: Term Sheet Negotiation

A term sheet is a non-binding letter of intent outlining the key economic and governance terms of the investment. Key terms to negotiate:

  • Valuation (pre-money): The most visible term. But valuation is not the only term that matters.
  • Liquidation preference: 1x non-participating is standard and founder-friendly. 2x or participating preferred is not.
  • Pro-rata rights: Investor's right to invest in future rounds to maintain their ownership percentage. Reasonable and standard.
  • Board seat: Series A investors typically take a board seat. Seed investors may not.
  • Protective provisions: Investor veto rights on major decisions (future financings, acquisitions, sale). Standard provisions are acceptable; seek to limit scope.
  • Option pool shuffle: If the term sheet requires expanding the option pool before closing (increasing dilution for founders), negotiate whether it comes pre- or post-money.

Hire a founder-experienced lawyer to review the term sheet. The legal fees are a small fraction of the capital you're raising and the terms are binding (in practice) even though the document says "non-binding."

Phase 7: Due Diligence

After signing the term sheet, the investor conducts due diligence. This is where the data room pays off. Typical due diligence covers:

Legal due diligence: The investor's counsel reviews corporate documents, IP assignments, key contracts, employment agreements, cap table, and prior financing documents. Any gaps (missing IP assignments from a co-founder, undocumented verbal agreements with customers) will surface here and must be resolved before closing.

Financial diligence: Verification of revenue figures, customer concentration, churn rate, and unit economics against your model. Have clean books (accrual basis, not cash basis) and be able to reconcile your dashboard metrics to your financial statements.

Reference checks: Investor calls former colleagues, customers, and other investors who have worked with you. Be proactive: offer a reference list of people who will speak enthusiastically. Investors will also call people not on your list — there is no controlling this, only managing it by maintaining your reputation across your professional network.

Due diligence for a Seed round typically takes 2–3 weeks. Series A due diligence can take 4–8 weeks.

Phase 8: Closing

Definitive documents: Your counsel and investor's counsel negotiate the full legal documents: Stock Purchase Agreement, Investor Rights Agreement, Voting Agreement, and Right of First Refusal and Co-Sale Agreement. First drafts from investor's counsel take 1–2 weeks; negotiation and redlines take another 1–2 weeks.

Signatures and wires: All parties execute documents (DocuSign), then the investor wires funds to the company's bank account. Upon receipt of the wire, the company issues shares.

Announcement: Press release or social announcement, coordinated with your investor. Some investors have communications preferences or blackout periods around other portfolio announcements.

Total Timeline

  • Seed round: 6–10 weeks from first meeting to close, assuming clean materials and no legal complications.
  • Series A: 12–20 weeks from first meeting to close.

Both timelines assume you have prepared materials before starting outreach. Add 2–4 weeks to those figures if you are building materials in parallel with meetings.

Building the Fundraise Gantt

In gantt-chart.io, create phases for prep, outreach, meetings, term sheet negotiation, due diligence, and closing. Add investor names as sub-tasks within the outreach and meetings phases so you can track each conversation independently. Set a final milestone for closing with a date that corresponds to your runway constraint — then work backwards to determine when you must start outreach to hit that close.

A fundraising Gantt does not replace the human relationships at the center of venture capital. But it ensures you are pursuing those relationships with urgency, discipline, and a clear picture of where each conversation stands.