Investors require a lot information to make an informed decision when investing in your startup. The more information they have, the faster they can go through it and make a decision. This is the reason you need to have your data room packed with essential documents before you start talking with investors (or at least as soon as possible).
In addition to the key investment documents you’ll need for any due diligence, founders should include their most recent investor presentation, basic financials for past performance and projections, cap table, and company organization/formation documentation (including business certificates, articles of incorporation, tax information, etc.). Being able to access these documents in your investor data room will allow investors to quickly and effortlessly create the deal memo or have a conversation amongst their partners that can result in an offer for a term sheet.
Another useful document you should have in your investor data room is an analysis of deal attribution which will show how your team has invested in other startups, which can help reassure potential LPs that you are capable of making the right investments. You might want to include additional details such as intellectual property information contracts with customers and suppliers market research, and more.
You can add documents to your data room at any point www.dataroomproducts.com/virtual-data-room-for-businesses/ but it’s crucial that you only allow access to an investor who is determined to commit to an agreement in a termsheet. If you grant an investor access to your data room before they are ready, it could slow down the process and could even cause them to not invest.