At Remagine Ventures, we invest very early, usually at pre-seed, in Israeli founders building at the intersection of AI, entertainment, media, gaming, consumer and the digital economy. In many cases, we meet companies before the numbers are obvious. Our job is not to ask a pre-seed company for Series A evidence. Our job is to understand whether the ingredients are there for something exceptional to emerge.
In most pre-seed rounds, there may be no ARR, no retention curves, no meaningful usage data, no repeatable sales process and sometimes not much more than a prototype, a few design partners and a strong point of view. But there’s normally a team, a prototype that’s been tested on real customers/ design partners and If you are lucky, strong pull from the market. At the base of it all there is also still a lot of belief and conviction that there’s a big opportunity.
That does not mean there is no diligence. It means the diligence is different.
Founder-market fit comes first
The first thing I look for is founder-market fit. At this stage, the team matters more than almost anything else, but “strong team” is not enough. Lots of impressive people start companies that do not work. The better question is whether these are the right people to build this specific company now.
Do the founders understand the market from the inside? Have they lived the customer pain? Do they have a technical, creative, commercial or distribution advantage that gives them an unfair edge? Have they earned a non-obvious insight that others have missed? There’s exceptions for every rule, but it’s much easier backing founders that have a deep understanding with either the clients they serve or the technology they are developing.
At pre-seed, you are often backing people before the company has fully revealed itself, so the diligence is really about judgment, speed of learning, founder chemistry and the quality of the insight.
I also pay attention to how founders respond to feedback. I do not mean “coachable” in the passive sense. The best founders are not waiting to be told what to do. But they are intellectually honest. They listen carefully, decide quickly and keep moving. That combination matters a lot more than a polished answer to every question.
The market matters more than the first product
Founders often spend most of the pitch explaining what they are building. That is understandable, but at pre-seed the product will almost certainly change. The market is harder to fake.
I want to know whether the company is entering a market that is large, growing and being reshaped by something meaningful: AI, regulation, consumer behaviour, new platforms, cost pressure, labour shortages or a change in how companies buy. I also want to understand how that market might look in five or ten years, not only how it looks today.
A TAM slide is not a market thesis. At pre-seed, market size is really a theory of change. Why is this market opening now? Why have incumbents not solved the problem already? Why will customers change behaviour? Why could this become a venture-scale company rather than a useful product or a good services business?
When VCs write their investment memo (in our case, a document we share with our LPs), we need to be able to answer the questions: what is the problem, why now, how big can this become, why are you the team to do it and what does the company look like if it works?
The insight is often the company
Every good startup has a secret hiding somewhere. It might be a customer insight, a technical insight, a distribution insight, a business model insight or a cultural insight. At pre-seed, I am looking for the sentence that makes me think: “That is obvious now that you said it, but I had not thought about it that way before.”
This has become even more important in AI. Many teams are building with the same models, the same APIs, the same frameworks and increasingly similar product surfaces. In that world, the question becomes: what do you know, own or access that others do not?
The moat may come from proprietary data, workflow ownership, distribution, brand, community, enterprise access, regulatory depth or a wedge into a market others misunderstand. But there has to be a believable path to something defensible. “AI will do it” is not a moat.
In AI, the data advantage is becoming the moat
For many AI-native companies, one of the most important diligence questions is whether the company can create or access high-quality proprietary data that improves the product over time. There’s normally big questions about platform dependency (especially at the application layer, when startups are ‘renting’ the model), and workflow automation for the clients. The strongest products are the ones that get the job done for the client end to end.
The models are becoming more powerful, but they are also increasingly available to everyone. The more commoditised the model layer becomes, the more valuable unique data, deep workflow integration and feedback loops become.
That does not mean every pre-seed company needs to own a massive dataset on day one. That would be unrealistic. But founders should be able to explain how usage makes the product better, how the product captures useful signals and why those signals will be hard for a competitor to replicate.
The best AI companies are not just wrappers. They are learning systems.
Competition is not a slide to dismiss
I get nervous when founders say they have no competition. There is always competition. It may be another startup, an incumbent, an internal team, a spreadsheet, an agency, a workflow, inertia or simply doing nothing.
The important thing is not whether competitors exist. They do. The important thing is whether the founders understand the competitive landscape better than the investor. Who is funded? Who is growing? Who is stuck? What are incumbents likely to build? What are the current solutions missing?
The most revealing question is often this: what do your competitors believe that you think is wrong?
That is where strategy lives. I also try not to assume competitors are stupid. Most of them are not. They have smart people, customers, capital and their own version of the truth. If your plan depends on everyone else being asleep, it is probably not a plan.
I’ve heard from founders that sometimes they don’t want to highlight their competitors, that’s fair. But if you’re being asked for a detailed competitive landscape and obvious players don’t appear in it, the VC could either think that you either deliberately chose not to include them or that you didn’t know they existed. Neither option is good.
What has to go right?
One of my favourite pre-seed diligence questions is: what has to go right for this company to become very big?
It is easy to list the reasons a startup might fail. Most startups do fail. The more interesting exercise is to map the assumptions that need to become true.
The customer pain has to be urgent enough. The buyer has to have budget. The product has to be meaningfully better than the current workaround. The founders have to recruit well. The market has to move in the right direction. The product has to become embedded in a real workflow. The company has to move quickly enough before incumbents or better-funded competitors catch up.
Pre-seed investing is not about certainty. It is about understanding which assumptions matter most and whether they can be tested quickly after the round. A strong founder does not pretend the assumptions are already proven. They know what needs to be proven next.
What could kill the company?
The opposite question is just as important: what could kill the company?
Sometimes the answer is obvious. The market may be too small, the buyer too slow, the product too hard to build or the team missing a key capability. Sometimes the risk is more subtle. The company may depend on a platform that can change its rules. The differentiation may erode. The data may be hard to access. The buyer may love the product but never prioritise it. The product may be valuable but not urgent.
Founders should not hide these risks. They should name them clearly and explain how they plan to reduce them. Pretending there are no risks does not build trust. Showing that you understand the risks better than anyone else does.
I’ve written specifically about the risks of what if the model companies go after the opportunity in my post: The Anthropic Question has changed the Google Question.
Would I want to work for these founders?
There is also a more personal test I use: would I want to work for these founders? Maybe not me, specifically, but the type of calibre I expect them to attract in development, design, sales, management.
And I’m not talking about working WITH them. It’s working FOR them. Can they attract top talent?
That distinction matters. As early-stage investors, we are not the protagonists. The founders are. Our job is to support them, challenge them, open doors, help them think through hard moments and be useful when it matters.
But the company belongs to the founders. They need to be the kind of people who can attract talent, customers, investors and believers. If I cannot imagine exceptional people wanting to join them on a difficult journey, that is a problem.
Does the deal fit the fund?
Finally, there is the practical side. Even if we like the founders and the company, we still have to ask whether the deal fits our fund. Here I must caveat that there are many exceptions. Speaking for myself, I’d say that while we have a model (x number of investments, y ticket size), for the right opportunity we have discretion to adapt the parameters.
But for most deals, we ask if the stage is right and is the valuation reasonable for the risk? Is the ownership meaningful? Is there room in the round? Can we actually help? Does it fit our thesis?
For Remagine Ventures, that usually means pre-seed and seed companies where we can be early partners to ambitious Israeli founders building AI infrastructure, agents and applications that reshape how people live, work and play.
A good VC-founder fit is not only about getting money. It is about having the right people around the table for the company you want to build.
What founders should prepare
Founders can make diligence much easier by preparing before the process starts. One thing I recommend is writing your own investment memo.
It does not need to be twenty pages. Five to seven pages is often enough. The point is to force clarity. What are you building? Why now? Why you? Why is this venture-scale? What have you learned so far? What are the main risks? What will you prove with the next round?
Writing the memo yourself helps you understand how an investor might write about your company internally. Bessemer’s public investment memos are a useful reminder that early-stage investing often starts with people, insight and market direction, while the original product can change dramatically over time. If you can write the memo clearly, you can usually pitch the company more clearly too.
I also recommend creating a simple data room, even at pre-seed. It does not need to be over-engineered. A clean Google Drive or Notion page is enough. But it should be organised, current and easy to navigate. a16z has written a useful guide on data rooms, and the underlying point is simple: the easier you make it for investors to understand the company, the easier it is for them to build conviction.
A pre-seed data room can include the deck, a short company memo, cap table, incorporation documents, founder bios, product demo or screenshots, customer discovery notes, design partner feedback, early pipeline, market map, competitive landscape, budget, use of funds, hiring plan, signed agreements or LOIs if you have them, and basic legal documents such as IP assignments.
You may not have all of this on day one, and that is fine. The goal is not to look like a later-stage company. The goal is to show that you are thoughtful, organised and transparent.
Another useful habit is keeping a diligence FAQ. Every time an investor asks a good question, write it down. If several investors ask the same question, it probably needs to be addressed in the deck, memo or appendix. The best fundraising processes improve as they go because the founders are learning from every meeting.
Customer references also matter, even very early. If you have customers, design partners or serious prospects, know who is willing to speak to investors and what they can credibly say. First Round Review has written well about how seed-stage partner meetings work, including the internal memo process and the role of customer conversations. Founders sometimes underestimate this part of diligence. A few thoughtful customer calls can do more to build conviction than another ten slides.
Know your next proof points
Most importantly, founders should know their next proof points. A pre-seed round is not just about surviving for another 18 months. It is about creating the evidence that makes the next round possible.
This is one of the most important questions I need to answer in a pitch. Assuming the pre-seed round gives you 18 months of runway, I need to understand what traction and proof points you expect to have when you’ll be raising the seed round a year from now. Keep in mind that the bar has moved up in every stage.
Before raising, be clear on what the company needs to prove. Is it technical feasibility? Customer pull? Retention? Revenue quality? A repeatable sales motion? Data advantage? Strategic partnerships? Hiring velocity?
Investors are not only underwriting where the company is today. They are underwriting the probability that the next round will be obvious to the market.
That is the real purpose of pre-seed diligence. It is not about pretending there is more data than there is. It is about understanding the founders, the market, the insight, the risks and the path from belief to evidence.
Founders sometimes think diligence is a test they need to pass. I think of it differently. Done well, it is a shared attempt to answer one question: could this become much bigger than it looks today?
That is the whole game.
And yes, after all of that, I sometimes ask Claude what to do.
But I try not to let it vote in investment committee.
He is a former General Partner at Google Ventures (GV) in Europe, former head of Google for Entrepreneurs in Europe, and founding head of Campus London, Google's first startup hub. Eze writes on Israeli tech, venture capital, artificial intelligence, and founder strategy.
He is also the founder of Techbikers, a nonprofit that brings together the startup ecosystem on cycling challenges in support of Room to Read.
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