Founder Raises $5M via New VC Platform
A pre-seed VC's matchmaking platform, InvestoMatch, just received a major data upgrade. The founder, Martin Tobias, noted a startup recently secured $5 million in commitments from investors they met on the platform, highlighting its effectiveness for early-stage capital.
Martin Tobias is the founder of Incisive Ventures, a Seattle-based pre-seed fund established in 2020 that focuses on B2B software startups. As a solo VC, he targets companies that have an MVP and a few initial customers, providing the first institutional capital before larger seed funds get involved. Tobias is a serial entrepreneur himself, having been a three-time, venture-backed CEO who raised over $500 million for his own companies, including taking two public. He has also been a prolific angel investor in more than 250 companies and was an early investor in firms like Google and DocuSign. Incisive Ventures' core thesis is to back companies that "reduce friction at scale." The firm typically writes checks averaging $250,000 and in May 2025, it closed a $10.5 million fund to back around 30 enterprise software startups. The creation of a matchmaking tool like InvestoMatch aligns with a broader industry trend of VC firms building "platforms"—services beyond capital to support founders and source deals. Research shows that VC firms with significant platform teams correlate with higher net IRR and return multiples compared to those without. The platform, InvestorMatch.ai, uses machine learning and natural language processing to create high-fidelity matches between founders and funders from a pool of over 40,000 funding opportunities. It aims to reduce the time and cost associated with traditional fundraising by providing more targeted introductions.
