What investors actually check before they wire

The first check is the dullest. Is there a registered company, is it registered where you said, are the directors the people in the room, and is the share structure what the cap table claims.

In Nigeria this is a CAC registration and a status report. It sounds trivial until a round stalls because the entity taking the money was registered as a business name rather than a limited company, or because a co-founder who left two years ago is still on file as a director.

Check your own filings before an investor does. Fixing a registration takes weeks and it is a terrible thing to discover during a raise.

Bank statements, not a spreadsheet. An investor wants to see money arriving from customers who are not related to the founders, on a schedule that matches the story.

Three things reliably cause trouble here. Revenue that includes grant money or the founders' own capital. Revenue booked when a contract was signed rather than when cash arrived. And a single large payment annualised into a headline figure.

None of these are fatal if you disclose them yourself. All of them are close to fatal if the investor finds them.

Expect calls to your customers. Not many, usually three to five, and usually ones the investor picks rather than ones you offer.

What they ask is simple: do you use this, what did it replace, what would you do if it disappeared tomorrow. A customer who says they would be mildly inconvenienced has just repriced the company.

This is also where concentration surfaces. If one customer is a large share of revenue, say so first. Volunteering fragility reads as command of the business. Having it discovered reads as either not knowing or not telling.

Founder identity, prior roles, and whether the story of the last five years holds together. Most of this is a search and two reference calls.

Overstated titles are the usual casualty. A founder who was on a team at a bank and described themselves as having run the division has not committed fraud, but they have told an investor that their claims need checking, and that suspicion then applies to every number in the deck.

The last item is the one that separates a smooth raise from a slow one. Every early company has something awkward in the file. The investor is not looking for a company with nothing awkward. They are looking for a founder who already knew.

• Certificate of incorporation and a current status report on the company.
• A cap table that reconciles with your filings, including anything convertible.
• Twelve months of bank statements for the company account.
• Your three to five largest customer contracts or written agreements.
• Employment or contractor agreements for anyone material, including co-founders.
• Any licence the business needs to operate legally in its sector.
• A short written note on any of the above that is messy, with what you are doing about it.

On this platform every founder statement is marked as founder-stated until somebody checks it. Verified means a specific check was performed, and the method is shown next to the result.

Unverified is not the same as failed, and the interface never conflates the two. Most claims sit unverified simply because nobody has looked yet, and implying otherwise would be its own kind of dishonesty.

• Due diligence — The checking an investor does before money moves.
• Data room — The folder of documents an investor reads after they are interested.
• Cap table — Who owns what, and what they paid for it.
• Customer concentration — How much of your revenue depends on your largest few customers.

This guide is general information about how investors read a business and how to present one. It is not investment advice, not legal advice, and not tax advice. For anything specific to your company, take professional advice from someone who knows your situation.