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Every day, investors are “talking” about what types of founders or business models they want to fund. This is spread out across millions of data points in the form of podcasts, blog posts, social media posts, and more. With Market Signals, the platform algorithmically scans 1m+ data points of content across the web, and surfaces investors that are particularly inclined toward the founder’s business model.

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Setting Up the Signal Feed

Before Market Signals can surface high-quality matches, spend five minutes on calibration. This is the most important setup step — a generic signal feed produces noise; a calibrated one produces leads.
1

Complete your company profile

Go to Settings → Company Profile and complete your company description, sector tags, and stage. Market Signals uses this as the baseline to score investor content relevance against your specific positioning.
2

Calibrate your thesis keywords

Navigate to Settings → Market Signals → Calibration. Set the specific thesis keywords that define your company’s investment story — not just your sector category, but your specific positioning within it. Example: “vertical SaaS for independent freight brokers” rather than just “logistics software.”
3

Set your signal parameters

In Parameters, control which content types Metal surfaces — web data, podcast mentions, published articles, or social posts — and how they’re weighted. Start with all four enabled; refine based on which produce the most actionable signals for your specific investor targets.
4

Configure your sources

In Sources, specify which content domains Metal includes. Enable specific RSS feeds or content categories based on where your target investors actually publish. If your investors cluster around a few key publications, adding those sources directly improves signal quality.
A well-calibrated signal feed — with specific thesis keywords and positioning language — produces meaningfully higher signal quality than running on defaults. Invest in this setup before you start working the feed.

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How It Works

Metal continuously monitors public content from thousands of investors — podcasts, Substack posts, LinkedIn articles, conference talks, and interviews. Each piece of content is analysed for investment thesis signals, which are then scored against your company profile for relevance. The result is a personalised signal feed: investors who are currently thinking and writing about spaces directly relevant to your raise, ranked by how closely their expressed conviction aligns with what you’re building.

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The Signal Feed

Navigate to Discovery → Market Intelligence to access your signal feed. Each signal card shows:

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Filtering the Signal Feed

You can filter the feed to focus on the signals most relevant to your current targeting:

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Why Market Signals Matter

Investors who are publicly articulating thesis in your space are actively forming conviction, easier to reference in outreach, and more likely to respond than investors targeted purely on historical portfolio data.
“I came across your recent piece on [publication] about [thesis area] — it maps closely to what we’re building at [company]. I’d love 20 minutes.”
A one-line reference to a specific thing they’ve said publicly is one of the most effective cold outreach openers available. Market Signals gives you the raw material for that.
Don’t treat every signal as an outreach trigger. A passing mention of your sector in a 45-minute podcast is a weak signal. An investor who publishes a 2,000-word thesis piece on your exact sub-sector is a strong one. Prioritise signals that show depth, precision, and recent interest — not just surface-level relevance.

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Acting on Signals

For each signal, you have two actions:
  • Add to Pipeline — Sdds the investor to your pipeline with the signal logged as the sourcing reason. The content source is saved alongside the investor record for reference when drafting outreach.
  • Pass — Dismisses the signal without adding to your pipeline. Metal learns from passes and refines the relevance of future signals shown to you.
Save the source URL when you add an investor from a signal. Reference it specifically in your intro request — naming the article or podcast episode shows you actually engaged with what they said.
Market Signals and AI Search are complementary, not competitive. AI Search finds investors based on historical investing patterns. Market Signals finds investors based on current expressed conviction, specifically surfacing investors that are thinking and writing about your space right now. The strongest targets are investors who appear in both: historical portfolio fit and recent public thesis expression. Those investors have pre-formed views on your category, are actively thinking about it, and have a track record of backing it with capital. Use Market Signals alongside AI Search, New Funds, and Similar Companies to build a multi-signal investor list that zooms in on the “most likely” investors.