How SeedForge Turns Your Pitch Deck Into a Profile Investors Read

Last updated: 5 October 2026. First edition: how the profile is built, what an investor sees, what stays private to you, and what is free.

SeedForge, a fundraising platform for startups, builds your profile from the pitch deck you upload, plus your LinkedIn and website if you add them. You review and edit the draft before the profile is created. Building and sharing the profile is free, and one link always shows the current version. The optional 30-minute AI Session adds your own answers.

To see yours, upload your deck at seedforge.com: the draft is ready to review in about ten minutes, and once the profile is complete your matched investor list, investors matched to your company with a drafted intro for each, unlocks free. The rest of this page explains each step, what an investor actually sees when they open your link, which parts only you can see, and why a structured profile reads differently from a PDF in an inbox. Every product detail below describes SeedForge as it works in production today.

How does SeedForge build a startup profile from a pitch deck?

The build happens inside onboarding and takes about ten minutes. The step-by-step setup guide in the SeedForge help centre has the screen names; here is the short version.

1. Sign up. Click Get Started on seedforge.com, enter your email and type the six-digit code SeedForge sends you.

2. Choose Founder. This tells SeedForge you are building a startup profile.

3. Add your LinkedIn. SeedForge uses it for your founder background. You can skip it.

4. Add your website. SeedForge uses it for company details. You can skip this too.

5. Upload your deck. A PDF of up to 50MB. You can also add it later.

6. Let SeedForge draft the profile. It reads your deck, LinkedIn and website together and fills in a first version.

7. Review every field. On the Basic Information screen you check the company details, sector, stage, website, description, tags and fundraising details, and fix anything that is off.

8. Click Looks good. Your profile now exists. You can open it, keep editing, or share it.

Each source you add makes the first draft more complete, and the deck carries the most weight. It holds your argument: the problem, the product, the market, the traction, the team and the ask. LinkedIn fills in who you are. The website fills in what the company says about itself in public.

Later edits live in one place: Profile & Proof, then SeedForge Profile, then Edit your profile. One practical warning from the product itself: when you add a document inside the edit form, click Save changes at the top of the page, or the file is not kept. To swap only the deck, use Upload new pitch deck on the same page; that saves as soon as the upload finishes.

What does an investor see when they open your SeedForge link?

An investor who opens your link lands on a single page, open to anyone with the link. At the top sit the company name, stage, amount being raised, sector, location and founding year. Below that, your deck is already open in the page, so they read it right there. Then comes a short description of the business and your team, with previous companies, roles and dates.

Each link you create can show up to four sections, and you choose which ones for each investor:

• Fundraising: the round you are raising and its details.

• Pitch Recording: your AI Session recording, if you chose to do one.

• Documents: the files you attach beyond the deck.

• Team: who is building the company and what they did before.

You also decide, per link, whether the investor can download the deck. It opens in the page either way.

Here is how that compares with the way most decks still travel.

See the exact page an investor opens on an example SeedForge profile.

Everything on the page comes from you: your deck, the details you entered, your documents and, if you recorded one, your own words in the session. SeedForge's part is the structure. Every founder's profile follows the same layout, so an investor who has read one knows where to look on the next.

What does the optional AI Session add?

The AI Session is a 30-minute live session that works like a first call between a founder and an investor. It is optional. Your profile exists and can be shared without it.

If you do one, two things change. Your own answers, in your own words, are added to the profile, and you can show the recording to investors through the Pitch Recording section on any link where you turn it on. Your feedback also gets deeper, because SeedForge then has your answers as well as your deck to work from.

The first AI Session is free. Additional sessions cost $25 each.

Which parts of SeedForge only you can see?

Some of what SeedForge produces is for you alone.

• Your feedback. SeedForge reads your deck argument by argument and tells you where it is strong and where an investor is likely to push. That feedback, and any score, stays on your Feedback page, where only you see it.

• Your profile itself, until you share it. Nothing is shared without a link you send, and each link shows only the sections you turned on.

• What happened after you shared. On Share your Profile, the page in SeedForge where you create and manage your links, the visitors log shows each visitor, the link they used, their visits, last visit, total time and how deep they read. The deck reading chart shows how far investors read your deck, page by page, and where most of them stop.

You can also have SeedForge email you when an investor views your profile, instantly or as a daily digest; you choose on Share your Profile. Most visitors stay anonymous unless a link asks for an email. A link asks for an email only if you turn on Require email to view, which is off by default.

Each link also has its own switch. Turn it off or delete it, and that investor's access ends, while every other link keeps working.

What is free on SeedForge, and what costs money?

Most of what this page describes is free.

Outreach is the one part you pay for on outcomes. You connect your LinkedIn and approve every message. SeedForge then sends from your account to matched investors, and to founders who already raised from those investors, asking them for a warm intro to the investor. After the 30-day trial, you pay only when an investor call is booked or a warm intro is offered. Complete your profile and your full matched investor list unlocks free, whether or not you ever turn outreach on.

If you want to see which investors have a publicly evidenced deal in the last six months, the Active Investor Index lists them with dated evidence per row, refreshed weekly.

Why does a pitch deck on its own leave investors with open questions?

A deck is a compressed argument. DocSend's pitch deck research, published by Dropbox puts the typical deck at roughly 20 pages with about 50 words per slide. That is about a thousand words to carry a company. Every slide has to stand in for a conversation the investor has not had with you yet. The investor also arrives in a hurry. In field experiments by Ye Zhang of the Stockholm School of Economics, cold pitch emails to early-stage venture capitalists, mainly in the US and other English-speaking countries, were opened 12.03% of the time, and an opened email held the investor for roughly 24 seconds on average. Zhang measured that in March and April 2020, a strange stretch for everyone, and the median was shorter still. The point stands: the first look is short.

The same research holds a second detail that matters for founders. When real investors rated a series of startup profiles in Zhang's other experiment, they averaged about a minute per profile, and after a short break partway through they spent 27 seconds less on each one. Attention thins as the pile grows. A profile that puts the important facts in the same predictable places costs the reader less of that thinning attention. Time on the deck does track outcomes. DocSend's data shows that in 2020, investors spent over four minutes on pre-seed decks that went on to raise money and one minute 30 seconds on decks that did not. Read that with care: a stronger company earns a longer read, so the deck is only part of the cause. What the number does say is that the decks that raised money were the ones investors kept reading past the first screen. Your job is to give investors something worth reading once they do.

Volume makes all of this sharper. Aaron Golbin, co-founder and general partner at LvlUp Ventures, wrote in a September 2026 Crunchbase News column that his team reviewed close to 25,000 applications for its funds and accelerators last year. Golbin's summary of what stood out: "The most-fundable companies can describe their business in one tight sentence."

What do early-stage investors look at first?

The team, usually. In a randomized field experiment run on AngelList by Shai Bernstein, Arthur Korteweg and Kevin Laws, nearly 17,000 emails went to 4,500 active early-stage investors with the start-up information randomly varied. The study was later published in the Journal of Finance in 2017. The average investor responded strongly to information about the founding team, and not to traction or to which lead investors were already in. The least experienced investors responded to everything. Later financing tells a fuller story. Young Soo Jang and Steven Kaplan studied due diligence records on over 8,000 sourced deals at one early-stage fund, presented at the 2026 American Economic Association meeting. The team predicted who got initial funding. Market and product better explained which companies raised larger rounds and lasted. Their paper is a working paper from a single fund, so treat it as one careful look at the data.

Older evidence points the same way. Steven Kaplan, Berk Sensoy and Per Strömberg followed 50 venture-backed companies from early business plan to public company. The business lines stayed remarkably stable. The people changed a lot: only 44% of the CEOs at the annual report closest to three years after going public were the CEOs named in the business plan. Put those three studies side by side and a pattern for the profile appears. Investors open with the team, then stay for the market and the product. A deck can bury the team slide on page 14. The profile gives the team a section of its own, with previous companies, roles and dates, right below the deck and the description, and keeps the business case where the investor expects it. For what investors look at slide by slide, our guide to pitch deck examples and what investors look at on each slide goes deeper.

Why does every new investor start from zero?

A fundraise is a long series of first meetings. Each fund opens your material cold. Each partner who hears about you from a colleague opens it cold again. Conviction does not transfer between funds, so whatever proof you have has to be in front of every reader, every time, without you in the room.

A deck by email makes that harder than it needs to be. The file you sent in March is still the March file in that investor's inbox in May, after you signed two customers and hired a lead engineer. Forwarded inside the fund, the old version is what the next partner reads. You end up re-sending, re-explaining and re-answering, and the investor ends up asking questions your newer material already answers.

One link that always shows the current profile fixes the version problem. Upload a new deck or change a number, and every active link shows the update, as long as that section stays visible on the link. You never resend anything. The same idea runs through our guide on how to show investors you are ready without repeating yourself, which covers what to put in front of investors before the first call.

What does the profile change about a first meeting?

The profile is the proof layer between your deck and the first call. Its job is to put the evidence in front of the investor before you speak: the round, the team and its history, the deck in full, the documents that back up the claims, and, if you recorded one, your own answers to the questions a VC asks in a first meeting. You built it once, from material you already had. Each investor gets it through their own link, set to the sections you chose for them.

That shifts what the first call is for. An investor who has read the profile arrives with the basics settled and can spend the meeting on the questions that decide the deal. You spend less time re-telling the company history and more time on the parts of the story that need you in person. Speed follows from that, as a side effect of investors arriving informed.

How do you get a profile investors want to read? A checklist

The profile is built from your deck, so the deck you upload is the biggest lever you have. Work through this list before you upload, then once more on the Basic Information screen.

Before you upload

• Write your one sentence. Golbin's test is a good one to borrow: the sentence becomes the opening of your description. Name who it is for, what it does and why now.

• Make the team slide carry real history. Previous companies, roles and dates. The research above says that is where investors look first.

• Put a date on every number. "40 paying customers as of September 2026" reads as a fact. "Growing fast" reads as a claim.

• State the round. Amount, instrument and stage, in plain words, on one slide.

• Keep it to one file. PDF, under 50MB. If your deck runs to 30 pages, the profile will show all 30, so cut it first. Our investor pitch deck template gives a ten-slide structure.

On the review screen

• Read every field the draft filled in. The draft is a first version. You know which numbers are current and which slide is out of date.

• Fix the sector, stage and tags. These shape how your profile reads at a glance.

• Check the description against your one sentence. Edit until they agree.

After you create it

• Attach the documents an investor asks for second. Financial model, customer references, a product walkthrough. Choose per link whether each one shows.

• Create one link per investor. Name it after the fund, so the visitors log shows which fund's link was opened and how it was read.

• Update the profile, never the attachment. When something changes, change it on SeedForge. Every active link shows the update.

For a broader comparison of profile formats and tools, see our guide on how to create an investor-ready profile. For why a living profile behaves differently from a tracked file, our piece on DocSend alternatives and the living profile covers that ground.

Frequently Asked Questions

How does SeedForge build a startup profile?

SeedForge reads the pitch deck you upload, plus your LinkedIn and company website if you add them, and drafts every field of your profile. You review and edit the draft on the Basic Information screen, then click Looks good to create it. The optional AI Session can add your own answers later.

Do I need to do the AI Session to get a SeedForge profile?

The 30-minute AI Session is optional. Your profile is built from your deck and the other sources you add, and you can share it as soon as you create it. If you do one, your own answers join the profile and your feedback gets deeper. The first session is free and additional sessions cost $25 each.

What does an investor see when they open my SeedForge link?

They see one page, open to anyone with the link: your fundraising details, your deck open in the page, a short description and your team. Depending on the sections you turned on for that link, they may also see your documents and your AI Session recording. Your feedback and any score stay on your Feedback page.

What happens to my link when I update my deck?

Every active link shows the new version automatically, as long as that section stays visible on the link. To replace only the deck, use Upload new pitch deck, which saves as soon as the upload finishes. You never resend a link, and an investor who forwards it inside their fund shares the current profile.

What does SeedForge cost?

Building and sharing your profile is free, and so are deck feedback, your first AI Session and your matched investor list once your profile is complete. Additional AI Sessions cost $25 each. SeedForge Outreach from your own LinkedIn runs free for 30 days, then costs $10 per call booked or warm intro offered.