Every fund has a thesis. Raylu turns it into a pipeline.
Born inside a venture firm.
Before Raylu, Ali Dastjerdi was an investor at Insight Partners, watching analysts lose weeks to the same grind: stitching together company lists, hunting for email addresses and updating the CRM by hand. A single investment thesis could take weeks to turn into a first email to a founder.
When large language models got good enough to do that work, Ali picked up the phone and called Nathan Ondracek and Sam Ilkka, two former AWS engineers. The pitch was short: we need to build this. In 2022, all three quit their jobs.
Three founders became a team of more than twenty by mid-2026, and the mission hasn't changed: make private markets move like public markets.
Deal sourcing still runs on spreadsheets and databases built for everyone else.
Investors know exactly what they are looking for. Finding the companies that fit still means weeks of manual research, niche opportunities that generic databases miss, and outreach that sounds like every other fund's.
01
Describe the thesis
Write the investment thesis in plain language and Raylu builds a live market map of matching companies, drawn from 300,000+ sources.
02
Research and score
Each company gets dozens of researched data points, from hiring pace to patents, each with a cited source, plus a score against the fund's own criteria.
03
Reach out in your voice
Raylu drafts multi-touch founder outreach in the fund's voice, sends it from Gmail or Outlook and syncs every touch to DealCloud, Affinity or Salesforce.
80+
Funds use Raylu to source deals
$500B+
Combined assets under management of those funds
$12M
Raised across a seed round and an $8M Series A
The Series A was led by HighlandX, which started out as a customer. Figures from raylu.ai.
From a strong product to a sales motion.
In mid-2024, we worked with co-founders Nathan Ondracek and Ali Dastjerdi as Raylu moved into a sales motion: outreach, external visibility, the funnel and a go-to-market plan.
“Yianni was exactly what we were looking for as we transitioned into a sales motion for our startup. With a team of product and tech personas, he brought a much needed outside point of view to help kickstart our outreach, sales, external visibility, and funnel. I would highly recommend Yianni to anyone looking for an experienced set of eyes to look over and advise a GTM plan.”
— Nathan Ondracek, Ali Dastjerdi, Raylu, Inc.
Next projects.
(More work)
