November 15, 2022

What is an investment memo?

Entrepreneurs heading early-stage companies and startups often need to participate in fundraising to bring their ideas to life. They tend to look to angel investors and venture capital firms to raise the money for marketing, fulfilling purchase orders, and building solid teams.

However, the entities with the money to fund your business aren’t going to go into the investment blindly.

That’s where investment memos come in. They help investors through decision-making by providing details about your new business that investors value.

What is an investment memo?

Investment memos are often referred to as "deal memos." These memos share your investment thesis with core details about your business and its market. Investment memos are essential tools for:

  • Entrepreneurs: Entrepreneurs use investment memos as tools for fundraising, giving them better odds of getting the funding they need.
  • Investors: These memos allow potential investors to perform due diligence and make wise investment decisions.

Nine key components of an investment memo

Your investment memo should include nine key components. Those components include:

  1. Company overview: Clearly outline your business model, the milestones you have achieved, and those you plan to achieve.
  2. Team: Include bios of core team members.
  3. Valuation metrics: Valuation metrics should be carefully thought out, representing where your business stands today, its revenue, business loan requirements, and market opportunity.
  4. The problem: Clearly describe the problem your business solves.
  5. The solution: Clearly explain how you solve the problem.
  6. Market size: Show investors the overall market opportunity based on market size.
  7. Product development: Explain what stage of product development you’re in.
  8. Sales and distribution: Further details on current sales and distribution channels.
  9. Pitch deck: A slide deck offering easy-to-consume information about your company.

Best practices for writing an investment memo

As you write your investment memo, you should keep the following best practices in mind:

  • Be honest: You never want to over-promise and under-deliver with investors.
  • Be realistic: You know your company can grow to be a billion-dollar corporation, but it’s more important for investors that you provide realistic projections.
  • Be transparent: Don’t try to hide data; it will only leave holes in your memo that will lead to investors questioning the validity of your investment.
  • Think like an investor: Think about what investors want to see as you write your memo.

Example of a successful investment memo (and why it worked)

Airbase's highly successful investment memo helped the company raise $60 million in 10 days. Click here to check it out. Here are the factors that made the memo successful:

  • The author didn’t focus on nuances investors don’t value.
  • The author understood that not every investor would see their vision.
  • The author was transparent and shared their story.

The do’s and don’ts of seeking investors

As with any other process, there are right ways and wrong ways to attract the funding you need. Key "do and don’t" areas are described in detail below.

Types of funding

  • Do: Take time to learn about the different types of funding available, and choose one that works well for your business.
  • Don’t: Blindly accept funding just because it’s available.

There are several different types of funding to consider. Those include:

Valuation

Your company may make billions of dollars in revenue in the future, but it’s not there yet. Investors pay close attention to valuation metrics; if your valuation is too high, you won’t get a deal. Low valuations may also scare investors off. Make sure your pricing is reasonable, given the current state of your business.

Y Combinator

Y Combinator is a group that many consider to be the graduate school for startups. Consider participating in the program and taking the Y Combinator approach to developing your investment memo.

Try Ramp for free
Share with
Ramp team
The Ramp team is comprised of subject matter experts who are dedicated to helping businesses of all sizes work smarter and faster.
Ramp is dedicated to helping businesses of all sizes make informed decisions. We adhere to strict editorial guidelines to ensure that our content meets and maintains our high standards.

FAQs

When our teams need something, they usually need it right away. The more time we can save doing all those tedious tasks, the more time we can dedicate to supporting our student-athletes.

Sarah Harris

Secretary, The University of Tennessee Athletics Foundation, Inc.

How Tennessee built a championship-caliber back office with Ramp

Ramp had everything we were looking for, and even things we weren't looking for. The policy aspects, that's something I never even dreamed of that a purchasing card program could handle.

Doug Volesky

Director of Finance, City of Mount Vernon

City of Mount Vernon addresses budget constraints by blocking non-compliant spend, earning cash back with Ramp

Switching from Brex to Ramp wasn’t just a platform swap—it was a strategic upgrade that aligned with our mission to be agile, efficient, and financially savvy.

Lily Liu

CEO, Piñata

How Piñata halved its finance team’s workload after moving from Brex to Ramp

With Ramp, everything lives in one place. You can click into a vendor and see every transaction, invoice, and contract. That didn’t exist in Zip. It’s made approvals much faster because decision-makers aren’t chasing down information—they have it all at their fingertips.

Ryan Williams

Manager, Contract and Vendor Management, Advisor360°

How Advisor360° cut their intake-to-pay cycle by 50%

The ability to create flexible parameters, such as allowing bookings up to 25% above market rate, has been really good for us. Plus, having all the information within the same platform is really valuable.

Caroline Hill

Assistant Controller, Sana Benefits

How Sana Benefits improved control over T&E spend with Ramp Travel

More vendors are allowing for discounts now, because they’re seeing the quick payment. That started with Ramp—getting everyone paid on time. We’ll get a 1-2% discount for paying early. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but when you’re dealing with hundreds of millions of dollars, it does add up.

James Hardy

CFO, SAM Construction Group

How SAM Construction Group LLC gained visibility and supported scale with Ramp Procurement

We’ve simplified our workflows while improving accuracy, and we are faster in closing with the help of automation. We could not have achieved this without the solutions Ramp brought to the table.

Kaustubh Khandelwal

VP of Finance, Poshmark

How Poshmark exceeded its free cash flow goals with Ramp

I was shocked at how easy it was to set up Ramp and get our end users to adopt it. Our prior procurement platform took six months to implement, and it was a lot of labor. Ramp was so easy it was almost scary.

Michael Natsch

Procurement Manager, AIRCO

“Here to stay:” How AIRCO consolidated procurement, AP, and spend to gain control with Ramp