Learn the different ways of how Kruncher can automate your deal screening and their customization options.
GUIDE INDEX
A practitioner-led walkthrough of how serious investment teams configure Kruncher to screen every inbound deal against their thesis, surface what matters, and reclaim analyst time for judgment work.
Every investment team faces the same structural tension. Ninety percent or more of inbound deal flow is structurally out of scope: wrong stage, wrong geography, wrong sector, wrong business model. The instinct is to discard it quickly. But the cost of discarding too quickly is the deal you should have seen, the founder who reaches out cold, the unicorn buried in the noise. The cost of reading carefully is analyst time you do not have.
Most teams settle this tension with a heuristic: a partner or analyst skims the deck, makes a fast call, and moves on. The result is uneven coverage, biased decisions that depend on who happened to look, and institutional memory that lives in someone's inbox until they leave the firm.
Kruncher solves this differently. Every inbound company is read, scored against your thesis, and routed automatically. The analyst still owns the judgment. Kruncher owns the reading, the standardization, the routing, and the record.
The result is not just faster screening. The result is complete coverage, consistent evaluation, and an audit trail that survives team changes.
This guide applies to both venture capital and private equity teams, although the emphasis differs by segment.
For VC teams, the dominant pain is inbound volume: dozens to hundreds of decks per week, the majority structurally irrelevant. Screening is about getting to a confident yes-or-no on each deal in minutes rather than hours.
For PE teams, the dominant pain is fragmentation: sell-side decks, data rooms, internal memos, transcripts, and CRM notes scattered across systems. Screening is about converting that fragmentation into a comparable, thesis-aligned view of every opportunity before the partner spends time on it.
The architecture below works for both. The configuration choices that differ between segments are flagged as they come up.
Kruncher screening is organized as a configurable four-stage flow. Each stage is independently configured to match how your team works.
| Stage | What Kruncher Does | What You Get |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Ingestion | Watches your connected sources and picks up every new company automatically | One hundred percent inbound coverage, no manual upload |
| 2. Filtering | Measures every company against your investment thesis and deal score framework | Standardized, thesis-aware evaluation of every deal |
| 3. Routing | Sends matches to your inbox with full analysis ready; sends non-matches to the dropped queue | A clean working surface; no manual triage |
| 4. Notifications | Delivers a weekly digest of what was screened, matched, and dropped, on the channel of your choice | Confidence that nothing fell through, with zero check-in effort |
What follows is the practitioner-level walkthrough of each stage.
What it does. Kruncher watches the inbound sources you connect and picks up every new company automatically. No manual upload. No copy-paste from deck to platform.
Connect once, ingest forever. The connections that matter most:
http://kruncher.ai/app/settings/connectemail/
Why this matters more than it looks. Manual upload is the silent killer of screening discipline. The deals that get uploaded are the deals someone remembered to upload, which means the deals you actually evaluate are a biased sample of the deals you received. Automated ingestion eliminates that selection bias. Every deal that arrives is a deal that gets read.
Practitioner note. For inbound-heavy VC funds, email forwarding is usually the first connection. For PE firms, the CRM integration tends to be the foundation, because deal flow is often relationship-mediated and the CRM is where opportunities are first logged.
What it does. Every ingested company is measured against two configurable frames: your investment thesis and your deal score framework. The combination produces an instant fit decision.
Kruncher captures your fund's investment criteria across five dimensions: business model, stage, geography, industry, and revenue profile. For each dimension, you mark options as one of three:
This is not a tagging exercise. It is the operational expression of your thesis, applied automatically and consistently to every company that enters the pipeline.
Why this matters. The most common complaint about screening, especially in larger teams, is inconsistency: two analysts looking at the same deck reach different conclusions, and over time the thesis drifts because no one is enforcing it. Kruncher makes thesis enforcement automatic. The same criteria, applied the same way, every time. New analysts join the team and immediately produce screening output indistinguishable from the partner's.
Configure it here: https://kruncher.ai/app/settings/investment-score/
The thesis filter is binary (match or no match). The deal score is gradient. It ranks every company that passes the thesis filter on the dimensions you decide actually move the needle: team, market, business model, traction, portfolio fit, or any custom dimensions you define (up to several hundred parameters).
The configurable rubric is the point. A generic deal score is worth less than nothing; every fund prioritizes differently. For an early-stage B2B SaaS fund, team and founder background carry the most weight. For a PE roll-up strategy, market size and unit economics dominate. Kruncher lets you set the weights, the thresholds, and the dimensions, so the resulting score reflects how your fund actually thinks, not a generic benchmark.
Practitioner note for PE. In PE, the deal score framework is also where sell-side narrative gets checked against external evidence. The deck says "leading position." Kruncher pulls competitive landscape, web traffic, employee growth, and customer signals to test whether the narrative holds. This is where the standardization advantage compounds: every sell-side story gets the same treatment.
Configure it here: https://kruncher.ai/app/settings/investment-thesis/
What it does. Match and No Match are not the end of screening; they are the decision point that determines what happens next. Kruncher gives you explicit control over routing for both outcomes.
When a company is flagged as a Match, you choose where it goes and what runs automatically. The most common configuration:
Why this matters. The lag between "this looks interesting" and "I have enough context to take a call" is where most deal flow dies. Auto Run Full Analysis collapses that lag to zero. The partner opens the deal and the diligence is already done.
Companies flagged as No Match are routed to the dropped queue by default. They are not deleted. They are filed with the reason for the no-match decision, so that:
Optional automated outreach. For teams that want to close the loop with founders, Kruncher generates a personalized rejection or follow-up email referencing the specific reasons the company did not fit, sent from your own email client. This is a configurable behavior, not a default.
What it does. A weekly digest summarizes everything Kruncher did on your behalf: companies screened, matches found, drops filed, signals worth a second look.
Channels. Email is the default. Slack and WhatsApp are available for teams that prefer chat-based briefings. The cadence is configurable (weekly is most common; some teams run daily during heavy fundraising cycles).
What the digest contains. Not a raw activity log. A curated brief: the matches that warrant attention, the high-deal-score companies even if they did not match thesis (worth a glance), and the patterns in what got dropped (which can flag thesis drift or sourcing-channel quality issues).
Why this matters. Screening automation only works if the team trusts it. The weekly digest is the trust layer. It demonstrates, every week, exactly what was done and why. There is no black box.
Configure it here: https://kruncher.ai/app/manage-profile/
The four-stage flow above describes the mechanics. The reason teams adopt Kruncher for screening is the change in how the team actually works.
The teams that have implemented this flow report meaningful reductions in screening time. Marvin VC went from roughly five hours per company to five minutes. Blacksheep Ventures reclaimed two to three hours per partner per day. 1982 Ventures scaled their weekly coverage by twenty times without adding headcount.
The time does not disappear. It moves. Analysts spend less time reading decks and more time on judgment, founder relationships, and thesis refinement. Partners spend less time triaging and more time deciding.
Standardization is the unglamorous benefit that compounds the longest. Every deal, screened by the same criteria, with the same structure, recorded the same way. New analysts produce screening output indistinguishable from the partner's. Departing analysts do not take their judgment with them. Quarterly thesis reviews can be grounded in what the firm actually saw, not what people remember.
This is particularly important for larger teams. In a fund with twenty-plus investment professionals, you cannot hold a meeting where everyone reads every deck. The only way to maintain consistency at that scale is to make the screening criteria explicit, automated, and uniformly applied.
The most important shift is qualitative. With Kruncher, the answer to "how do you know you are not missing deals?" stops being a heuristic and starts being an audit trail. Every company that arrived was read. Every drop has a reason. Every match has a report. This is not just operational hygiene; it is the foundation of decision confidence in front of an IC or an LP.
If you are setting Kruncher up for screening, the order that works in practice:
Most teams hit operational steady state within two to four weeks. The configuration is then refined quarterly as the thesis evolves.
Screening is the foundation. It is also the wedge. The teams who adopt Kruncher for screening typically expand within six to twelve months, because the same data layer that powers screening also powers the workflow that comes next:
Screening is the entry point. The platform underneath is what makes it scale.
This process automates and massively simplifies your outreach process, reducing it to a few clicks compared to manually researching the company and the founders' Linkedin, etc.
Inside company reports, click the "Contact Company" button on the left bar just below the company's logo.
This will open a floating window and it will ask for you to choose an email template to use.
NOTE: Read more on customizing email templates in this guide.
After you selected a template, you can view what will be sent to the company/founder.
The template follows the overall structure set in the email template customization, but each email content is customized precisely to the company's most recent situation with your fund details as well.
After everything is filled up to your satisfaction, press the "Send Email" button.
Your email will be sent from your client as if you had typed it natively in Gmail/Outlook/etc.
Note that this button will appear as "Open Email" if you have not connected your email to Kruncher.
Read this guide to learn more about automating your outreach.
If you take one thing from this guide, take this: the largest funds and the most experienced partners do not buy Kruncher to screen faster. They buy it to screen consistently. Speed is the immediate benefit. Consistency is the durable one.
In a small team, the partner's judgment can be the standard. In a growing team, the partner's judgment cannot scale. Kruncher is how funds capture the partner's judgment as a configurable system and apply it to every deal, every analyst, every quarter, without drift.
That is the work Kruncher does in screening. Everything else builds on it.
If you want to see how this flow would be configured for your fund's specific thesis and inbound sources, book a thirty-minute walkthrough at kruncher.ai/bookademo. We will look at five to ten recent deals you have already screened and show you what Kruncher would have produced.