After six years of investing at the seed stage and reviewing thousands of pitches across 20+ industries and six continents, we have developed a clear view of what separates the seed investments that generate exceptional outcomes from those that do not. This article is our attempt to share that view as transparently as possible.
We recognize that venture investors frequently publish "what we look for" content that is more marketing than substance. We have tried to avoid that trap here. What follows is a genuine account of how we evaluate investments — including the things we weigh more heavily than conventional wisdom suggests, and the red flags that cause us to pass even when a company appears strong on surface metrics.
The Team Question: Specific Expertise Over General Excellence
Every venture investor says they invest in teams first. At Leveiir, we mean something specific by this. We are not looking for generally excellent people who happen to be working on an interesting problem. We are looking for founders with an asymmetric, defensible insight into the specific problem they are solving — one that derives from direct experience and is not easily replicated by a well-funded competitor.
The question we ask ourselves about every founding team is: "Why is this team the best team in the world to solve this specific problem at this specific moment?" The answer can come from many sources — domain expertise accumulated over years in the target industry, a proprietary technical invention, unique access to the customer population, or deep personal experience with the problem. What matters is that the answer is specific, defensible, and honest.
We are skeptical of founding teams whose primary credential is general intelligence and execution ability without domain depth. The technology markets where the most transformative seed investments are made today — AI infrastructure, climate technology, advanced health diagnostics, financial regulatory technology — are complex enough that domain expertise genuinely matters. A brilliant generalist can catch up, but it takes time, and in a competitive market, time is often the resource in shortest supply.
Market Sizing: TAM Slides Are Necessary But Not Sufficient
We review TAM slides in every pitch deck. We find them almost uniformly unhelpful as presented. Every founder in every market presents a variation on "our SAM is $X billion and we only need Y% to be a large company." The math is always technically true and strategically uninformative.
What we actually want to understand from a market analysis is not the size of the eventual prize but the specific entry wedge. Where is the customer pain acute enough that buyers will pay today, before the product is complete? What is the plausible sequence of expansion beyond that initial wedge? What forces — regulatory, technological, demographic — are accelerating the urgency of the problem right now, and why does that make this a better time to build this company than it would have been 3 years ago or will be 3 years from now?
Product and Technical Differentiation
For technology companies, we want to understand the specific technical insight that makes the product work — and why it is not trivially replicable by a large incumbent with more resources. This does not mean we require patents or trade secrets. What we require is a credible explanation of why the product is technically difficult to build, what specific expertise or data advantage makes the founders better positioned to build it, and what the compounding technical advantage looks like over a 24-month horizon.
In the AI category specifically, we have become increasingly cautious about companies whose primary technical differentiation is using a commercial foundation model API to do X. The barrier to entry for prompt-based AI applications is very low, and the moat — if any — typically lies in proprietary training data, workflow integration depth, or domain-specific model fine-tuning rather than the choice of underlying foundation model.
Go-to-Market: A Believable Zero-to-One Story
Many seed-stage pitches include a compelling vision for $100M in ARR and a plausible explanation of how to get from $10M to $100M. What they frequently lack is a specific, credible account of how the company gets from zero to its first $1M in revenue. This first-dollar story is, in our view, the most important part of any seed-stage go-to-market analysis.
We want to know: who are the first 10 customers, by specific job title and company type? Why will they buy this product before it has proof points? What is the specific sales motion — outbound, inbound, product-led, channel, or direct — and why is that motion appropriate for this customer segment? What is the realistic sales cycle, and what are the most likely objections and how will they be addressed?
Founders who can answer these questions with specificity — ideally because they have already tested the answers in conversations with potential customers — demonstrate a level of commercial intelligence that meaningfully reduces execution risk and distinguishes genuine domain expertise from theoretical market understanding.
What Causes Us to Pass
In the interest of transparency, here are the most common reasons we pass on seed-stage investments that appear promising on initial review: founding team conflicts or misaligned equity splits that suggest relationship fragility; markets where the primary buying decision is made by individual consumers rather than enterprises; technology that depends on a regulatory or business model change that is speculative in timing; and competition from well-capitalized incumbents building directly competing products.
We also pass on founders who are primarily motivated by the fundraising process rather than by the specific problem they are solving — a distinction that is more visible than most founders realize. The founders who build the best companies tend to be almost irritatingly indifferent to venture capital validation. They are raising capital because they need it to execute on a specific plan, not because raising capital is the goal.
The Relationship Question
Beyond all of the analytical dimensions discussed above, we make a qualitative judgment about whether we want to work closely with this founding team for the next 7 to 10 years. Venture investing is a relationship business at its core. We look for founders who are direct, who seek and incorporate feedback, who are transparent about bad news as well as good, and who have the self-awareness to know what they do not know.
These qualities do not show up in a pitch deck. They show up in how a founder responds to a tough question in a first meeting, how they describe the team members who did not work out, and how they talk about the investors who passed on previous rounds. We pay close attention to these signals, and we find them highly predictive of partnership quality and — ultimately — investment outcome.
