Seed-stage due diligence is less about proving you have built a company than about proving you know the one you are building. Investors will pull on a handful of numbers — recurring revenue, burn, retention — and watch how quickly and precisely you answer. Founders who arrive with a clean data room and definitions they can defend spend the meeting on strategy instead of arithmetic. What follows is the checklist most seed investors work from, roughly in the order they ask for it.
MRR, net burn, runway. Expect to give ARR as well, and to break revenue movement apart into new, expansion, contraction, and churn. "We grew 22% last quarter" is a headline; the four-line bridge underneath it is the actual story, and it tells an investor whether growth is coming from new logos, from existing customers spending more, or from a discount that quietly gave away margin.
A single growth month is easy to inflate, so bring a three-month average alongside the monthly figure. If your MRR jumped 40% in March because one customer prepaid an annual contract, say that before you are asked. Volunteering the caveat builds more credibility than letting someone discover it in the billing export.
Split MRR by monthly versus annual, self-serve versus sales-led, and committed versus pilot. Investors care about how much revenue is genuinely contracted, how much renews in the next two quarters, and how much sits with your three largest customers. Concentration is not disqualifying at seed. Hiding it is.
Burn multiple is net burn divided by net new ARR for the same period. It answers a blunt question: how much money did you spend to buy each dollar of new recurring revenue? As a working heuristic, many seed investors treat anything under roughly 2x as reasonably efficient and under 1x as strong, but the right number depends on your sales cycle and contract size. Explain your context rather than quoting a benchmark back at them.
CAC payback is the number of months it takes to recover the cost of acquiring a customer. Show it blended, and separately for paid acquisition if you spend meaningfully there. A common target is under twelve months, though long enterprise contracts with heavy onboarding can justify a longer payback if the contract value is large and churn is low. LTV-to-CAC ratios get quoted constantly; treat the three-to-one rule of thumb as a sanity check, not a proof, because the LTV input is only as good as your retention assumptions.
Then gross margin. Subtract hosting, support, data, and third-party costs from revenue. A company with a services-heavy start might sit near 50% while a pure software product sits in the seventies or eighties. Both can be fundable. What matters is that you know which one you are and can describe the path from here to the other.
Track logo churn and revenue churn separately, because they behave differently. Losing ten small accounts barely dents revenue but signals a product problem. Losing one large account can erase a quarter of growth.
Net revenue retention combines churn and expansion. Above 100% means existing customers spend more over time than you lose. That is a powerful signal — but it can mask trouble. A business with 130% net revenue retention and 25% annual logo churn is running on a shrinking base of increasingly large accounts. Say that out loud if it describes you.
Group customers by signup month and track the share of revenue and the share of logos still active at three, six, and twelve months. You are looking for the curve to flatten rather than slide toward zero. If newer cohorts perform worse than older ones, that is worth flagging yourself with an explanation: a shift in acquisition channel, a pricing change, a new segment you are still learning to serve. Investors will find the pattern anyway. Being the one who names it sets the tone for the whole process.
The metrics get you the meeting; the paperwork gets you the term sheet. Most seed investors request a version of the following:
If something is genuinely missing — a filing in progress, a contract not yet countersigned — a one-line note explaining it beats silence every time. For anything touching tax positions, securities, or SAFE conversion mechanics, bring in an accountant or lawyer rather than improvising an answer on a call.
A data room that takes three weeks to assemble reads as a company that does not know its own numbers. Do it in a focused week instead:
Check that every number in the deck matches the model, that the model matches the statements, and that the statements match the bank. Name one person on your team who owns questions from investors, so nothing stalls in a shared inbox. Send PDFs and read-only links rather than editable files, and version everything with a date at the top.
Founders who treat diligence as a chance to demonstrate command of their own business, rather than a test to survive, tend to close faster and start the relationship with more trust than they walked in with. That is the whole point of the exercise.
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