Chris Fralic, a board partner at First Round, posted his AI hack of the day for founders: open a Google doc of almost 1,000 smaller VC funds that have recently raised, describe your startup in the Gemini side panel or upload your whole deck, and ask which funds fit. He said he was “super impressed with the results.”
It’s a good hack, and the list behind it is one of the best free resources in venture. I opened it before running anything. It holds 973 funds from 726 firms, each with a name, size, announcement date, fund number and location, plus a link to the announcement on most rows.
Two things in that sheet decide whether the answer you get back is worth an email.
The first is age. The list runs back to 2011, and only 152 of the 973 funds closed in 2024 or later:
Most seed funds write first cheques for three to four years after they close, then hold the rest for follow-ons. A firm whose latest fund here closed in 2016 can match your deck perfectly and still have nothing set aside for a new company.
The second is where the thesis comes from. The sheet records size, date and place, so when a model tells you a fund backs vertical AI, that answer comes from what the model remembers about the firm. Memory ages faster than funds do.
I checked the 148 firms whose latest fund closed since 2024 one by one, against each fund’s own announcement or site, and several rows needed fixing before I’d trust any match. One fund listed at $4,100M is a $100M fund. Another sits under the name of its anchor investor, a cancer-care practice, while a separate firm manages the money. A third writes $10M to $50M growth cheques into companies that already have revenue, a poor target for any pre-seed founder.
So I’d still run Fralic’s hack. I’d run it on a sheet that knows which funds have money and what each one says it backs.
The timing matters this quarter. 23 funds on the list closed in 2026 alone, and 64 firms closed their latest fund within the last 18 months. A partner who closed a fund this year has a whole portfolio left to build, and that’s the inbox you want to be in.
So I rebuilt the list for premium members.
Below the paywall
The Fresh Fund Sheet: all 973 funds rolled into 726 firms, each with months since its latest raise, a starting Recency score and an estimated first cheque, plus the researched focus, stage and source for the 148 firms that raised since 2024
The Fit Finder Prompt: a Claude prompt that reads your deck and the sheet, drops the funds past their investment window, checks every thesis on the web and returns your top 25 with a source for each match
The Deployment Read: three checks that tell you in two minutes whether a fund still writes first cheques
The Six Rows to Fix First: what the research turned up, from a fund listed at 41 times its size to funds that only make follow-on investments
The Fresh-Fund Opener: the first line to send a partner who just closed a fund
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The Fresh Fund Sheet:
