Building CapTrail: A Low-Cost Investor Research Tool for Early-Stage Founders
Built a database of over 20,000 investors using AI and automation tools, designed to make investor research accessible to pre-seed founders.
Ajay Anupani
Analyst at HT Media Group
From their time as
Research Analyst
Qubit Capital • 2024 - 2026
Overview
Ajay identified a gap in the market while working with pre-seed and seed-stage founders: the database platforms that investment professionals use to research investors carry subscription costs that most early-stage founders cannot afford. A founder who cannot afford to research investors ends up doing cold outreach without knowing whether the investor is active, interested in their sector, or has recently shifted focus to a different vertical.
The Story
Ajay identified a gap in the market while working with pre-seed and seed-stage founders: the database platforms that investment professionals use to research investors carry subscription costs that most early-stage founders cannot afford. A founder who cannot afford to research investors ends up doing cold outreach without knowing whether the investor is active, interested in their sector, or has recently shifted focus to a different vertical.
He decided to build a solution. CapTrail is an investor database product containing tens of thousands of investor profiles, priced accessibly for early-stage founders, designed to let them filter investors by industry, geography, deal stage, and check size before reaching out. The goal was to eliminate the most common reason outreach fails: targeting investors who are no longer active in the relevant sector.
He built the product using AI and no-code automation tools, without a formal engineering background. The database was assembled through automated data collection and structured into a searchable format.
At the time of the transcript, the product was in its final stages before launch, with marketing and SEO work remaining.