Free resource
Investment memo template for venture capital and private equity.
Twelve sections, written the way an investment committee reads: the recommendation first, the unit economics recomputed rather than repeated, and the risks ranked with an owner against each one. Use it as a working document for a live deal or as the house standard for your diligence process.
The structure
What each section has to actually answer.
- 01
Recommendation & terms
State the decision in the first paragraph so the committee reads the rest as evidence, not as suspense.
- •Invest / pass / revisit, with cheque size and ownership target
- •Round structure: pre-money, instrument, option pool, pro-rata rights
- •The two or three conditions the recommendation depends on
- 02
Company snapshot
One page a partner can read cold before the meeting.
- •What the company sells, to whom, and how it is priced
- •Founding date, headcount, geography, prior rounds and investors
- •Headline metrics: ARR or revenue, growth rate, gross margin, burn, runway
- 03
Market & timing
Size the opportunity bottom-up; top-down TAM slides rarely survive committee.
- •Bottom-up TAM/SAM/SOM built from customer counts and realistic ACV
- •Why now: regulatory, technology or behavioural change driving the shift
- •Competitive map with the honest substitute (often a spreadsheet or incumbent)
- 04
Product & moat
Separate what exists today from what is on the roadmap.
- •Shipped functionality versus roadmap, with evidence of usage
- •Technical or data advantage, and how durable it is
- •Dependencies: third-party models, single vendors, key integrations
- 05
Traction & cohorts
Growth quality matters more than growth rate.
- •Monthly new, expansion, contraction and churned revenue
- •Logo and net revenue retention by signup cohort
- •Customer concentration: revenue share of the top 5 and top 10 accounts
- •Pipeline coverage and sales cycle length by segment
- 06
Unit economics
Recompute every ratio from raw data rather than accepting the deck's version of it.
- •Blended and paid CAC, with the cost lines included in the calculation stated
- •Contribution margin per customer after support, hosting and payment costs
- •CAC payback in months and LTV/CAC on a gross-margin basis
- •Sensitivity: what the ratios look like if churn is 2x the reported figure
- 07
Financials & runway
Tie the model back to the bank statements and the MIS.
- •Historical P&L versus prior forecast, with variance explained
- •Monthly net burn, cash balance and months of runway at current and planned spend
- •Forecast drivers listed explicitly, with the assumptions that carry the plan
- •Working capital, deferred revenue and any debt or convertible obligations
- 08
Valuation & scenarios
Show the entry price against outcomes, not against comparable hype.
- •Bull, base and bear cases with stated revenue and margin drivers
- •Comparable multiples with the source and date of each comparable
- •Exit-value range, dilution path to exit and fund-level return multiple
- •The price at which the recommendation would change
- 09
Risks & red flags
Rank by severity and pair each risk with a mitigation or a diligence action.
- •Concentration, related-party transactions and revenue recognition questions
- •Unverified claims in the deck that the data room does not support
- •Key-person, governance, cap-table and regulatory exposure
- •Severity rating (high / medium / low) and owner for each item
- 10
Team
Assess the team against this specific problem, not in the abstract.
- •Founder backgrounds and the relevant edge each brings
- •Gaps in the leadership bench and the hiring plan to close them
- •Equity split, vesting status and reference-check summary
- 11
Diligence checklist & open questions
Close the memo with what is still unknown and who is chasing it.
- •Completed diligence items with the document that evidenced each
- •Outstanding items with owner and target date
- •Questions to put to the founder before the next committee
- 12
Appendix
Keep the body readable; park the working here.
- •Cohort tables, cap table, cohort retention curves and model extracts
- •Source index: every figure tagged to the file, page or sheet it came from
Questions
Writing the memo, answered.
- What should an investment memo include?
- A recommendation and terms up front, a company snapshot, market sizing, product and moat, traction and cohorts, unit economics, financials and runway, valuation scenarios, ranked risks, team assessment, an open-questions checklist and an appendix with source references.
- How long should an investment memo be?
- Five to ten pages for the body, with the working parked in an appendix. The recommendation, the unit economics and the risks should be readable in the first three pages.
- How is a VC memo different from a private equity memo?
- A venture memo weights market size, cohort quality and team more heavily and accepts unprofitable unit economics if payback is trending down. A private equity memo weights cash conversion, leverage capacity, customer concentration and exit multiples, and tests the plan against historical financials rather than forecasts.
- Can this template be generated automatically?
- Yes. eqwitty ingests the deck, financial model, MIS and data room, reconciles the figures across them and produces this memo structure with unit economics recomputed from raw data and risks ranked by severity.
Or have the memo written for you.
Upload the deck, model, MIS and data room. eqwitty reconciles them, recomputes the unit economics and returns this exact structure with citations and ranked risk flags.