The deck is sharp. The market is real. The numbers are interesting. Verify the founder.
A second-time founder whose first exit story shapes the conviction. A first-time founder whose technical-credibility claim is the spine of the investment thesis. A team of three with a complicated set of prior co-founder relationships. Public records hold the founders' verifiable history — prior shipped products, prior funding rounds, governance roles, prior litigation surface, public-conduct record. We assemble them into a report your investment-committee memo can lean on, before the term sheet is signed and before confirmatory diligence kicks off.
Why this is harder than it should be
Venture-capital diligence on the founder is a strange mix of intuitive and rigorous. The intuitive layer is the partner-conviction call: does this founder have the obsession, the technical depth, the operator instinct, the ability to attract a team. The rigorous layer is the verifiable record: what did they actually ship, who did they actually work with, what is the public-conduct history. The intuitive layer is what gets discussed in the partnership meeting. The rigorous layer is what saves the partnership from preventable mistakes — the founder whose first-exit narrative does not match the public record, the co-founder relationship that was acrimonious, the prior-litigation surface that was not disclosed in the intake, the public-conduct pattern that becomes a portfolio-management problem after the round.
The compressed pace makes the rigorous layer hard to do well. A competitive series-A round closes in two to four weeks from term-sheet. The diligence window is days, not weeks. Most VC firms have an associate or senior associate run public-record diligence as part of memo prep. The work is real but uneven — one associate's diligence is exhaustive and another's is fragmentary, depending on time available, depending on whether the partner pushed for depth, depending on which parts of the public-record surface the associate happens to be familiar with. The investment committee reads memos with different diligence depths and tries to normalize.
The structural problem is that the public-record surface for founders has expanded faster than the diligence tooling has. A founder's verifiable history is now spread across Crunchbase, AngelList, ProductHunt, GitHub, LinkedIn, X, Substack, podcast archives, USPTO, SEC EDGAR, IRS Form 990 records, OpenAlex, CourtListener, and the long-tail press surface. Assembling that surface for one founder takes a careful researcher most of a day. Doing it for a co-founder team, with the cross-relationship cross-references the team's history requires, takes most of a week. The investment-committee timeline does not have a week.
The defamation-and-framing layer is the part that most ad-hoc diligence does worst. A civil-litigation filing is not adjudicated wrongdoing. A forum thread is not a verified report. An aggregator-site claim is not a primary source. An ad-hoc memo that quotes an aggregator-site claim verbatim creates exposure that careful diligence avoids. The defamation framework is what turns the assembled record into a memo-ready artifact rather than a memo-ending one.
What MentionFox brings to VC diligence
The Founder Vetter is the workhorse for most VC diligence. The Executive Vetter handles the senior-leadership-track founders whose record is partly a public-company executive history. The PE Firm Vetting Report handles co-investor and counterparty diligence. The use-case pages explain the workflow shape. The methodology pages document the source taxonomy and confidence framework.
Founder Vetter
The flagship report for any founder under VC diligence. Twelve sections in the full report v2: identity and verified company-of-record, founding-date verification, role and equity-stake-where-public, prior shipped-product history, prior co-founder relationships and prior co-founder reputational pattern, prior funding history, technical-contribution depth via GitHub and patent surface, governance roles, prior litigation surface, public-conduct record, public-narrative consistency, and full source citations. The Snapshot tier returns in two minutes for early-screen consistency checks; the full report returns in five to eight minutes for memo-prep diligence.
Executive Vetter
For the founder whose career is partly a senior-executive history at prior public or large-private companies. Twelve sections covering prior leadership history with reporting-line traceback, governance roles via SEC and IRS Form 990 filings, board and committee positions, prior employer disciplinary surface where public, M&A history, conflict-of-interest exposure, and public-conduct record. Use when the founder's prior-executive layer is a material part of the investment thesis.
Use Case — VC Due Diligence
The detailed vertical use case for venture-capital and angel-investor founder diligence. Walks through the typical workflow shape, the decision points where the report adds the most leverage, the credit-economics across deal-screen, memo-prep, and confirmatory stages, and the reading rhythm a partner uses to consume the report alongside the deck and the model. Useful as a reading reference for partners and senior associates.
Founder Methodology
The full source taxonomy and confidence framework behind every Founder Vetting Report. Federal-Primary sources (USPTO, SEC, NIH) carry the highest weight. Authoritative-Secondary sources include Crunchbase, AngelList, ProductHunt, and GitHub. Aggregator and forum sources are signal, never verdict. Unverified claims are tagged. The disambiguation hard-gate prevents wrong-person reports. The probability yardstick provides explicit confidence statements. Read this to understand exactly what the report does and does not assert.
PE Firm Methodology
For diligence on a co-investing PE counterparty, a follow-on PE counterparty, or a PE acquirer in a portfolio exit conversation. Source taxonomy extends to SEC Form ADV filings, public-fund reporting where applicable, the firm's prior-portfolio public-conduct surface, and the prior-portfolio litigation surface. Useful both for the PE-firm-as-counterparty case and as a reference document for VC LPs evaluating PE-adjacent fund commitments.
Verification Vetter Methodology
The trust spine that runs through every report on the platform. Source-class taxonomy, confidence framework, citation discipline, defamation guardrails, disambiguation hard-gate. If you want to understand the methodology behind every report on every subject before trusting any specific one, this is the document an investment-committee chair would want on file alongside the firm's diligence checklist.
A typical workflow — what a senior associate actually does
A senior associate at a series-A-stage venture firm is staffing memo prep on a deal the partner committed to leaning into after the second meeting. The deal is a co-founder team of three. Partner timeline to investment committee is six business days. The associate has the deck, two reference calls already complete with founders' prior employers, the company's customer references, and a market-context note from the firm's research team. He needs to assemble the founder-public-record layer for the memo.
He runs Founder Vetting Reports on each of the three co-founders for 600 credits total, returning over twenty minutes in aggregate. The first report comes back clean and consistent with the deck — verified shipped-product history at the prior company matches the narrative, GitHub commit pattern matches the technical-contributor claim, public-conduct surface is empty in a way consistent with a low-public-profile engineer. The second report surfaces a prior co-founder relationship the deck had not mentioned, a small bootstrapped company that wound down four years ago with no public conflict surface but with a co-founder who is now visible in the public record at a competitor. The third report comes back with a clean shipped-product history and a public-conduct surface anchored to two podcast appearances and one industry-conference talk that are entirely consistent with the founder's stated technical narrative.
The memo gets written with the prior co-founder relationship surfaced and addressed. The partner asks the founder about it in the next-round call. The founder explains the wind-down cleanly and the relationship-with-the-current-competitor benignly. The deal proceeds to term sheet on a fuller picture than it would have had without the report. None of the three reports disqualified the deal. What they did was move the diligence from the associate's ad-hoc Crunchbase-and-LinkedIn-and-Google research to a public-record-anchored layer with cited sources and defamation-aware framing.
What the associate did not do: spend three days assembling each founder's verifiable record by hand. The reports did the assembly. He did the reading and the memo writing.
What data sources the report draws from
Every claim in a Founder Vetting Report is anchored to a named, public, verifiable source. The methodology pages list every source class and how it is weighted. For VC diligence specifically, these are the sources that drive the report.
- Crunchbase — venture-funding and company-record database. Verifies named companies, founding dates, funding rounds, founder rosters, executive-team rosters, and acquisition history. The single highest-leverage source for founder diligence.
- AngelList — startup roster, syndicate participation, founder profiles, fund GP listings. Cross-references with Crunchbase to surface inconsistencies in the founder or executive-team history. Surfaces angel-investor and operator-investor patterns that supplement the firm's stated history.
- The founder's public X bio history — recency-weighted self-described history, current-publication-of-record statement, public-conduct surface anchored to the founder's own bio over time. Used as a self-attested signal layer rather than a verification layer.
- GitHub public commit history — verifies technical-contribution claims for technical co-founders. Time-stamped commit history under the founder's handle is the gold-standard signal for hands-on engineering work claimed in the deck.
- Podcast appearance archives — for founders with a public podcast surface. Verifies stated narrative consistency, surfaces angle-evolution patterns, and provides the public-conduct context that long-form interviews give which short-form bios do not.
- SEC EDGAR — federal corporate-disclosure database. Surfaces governance roles, executive-officer disclosures, board positions, and ownership stakes for founders with public-company executive history.
- USPTO patent and trademark database — federal record of patent applications, grants, and trademark registrations. Used for founders who claim invention or named-inventor credit on prior products and for the trademark-registration history of the company's brand.
- IRS Form 990 records — federal nonprofit-disclosure filings. Verifies board-chair, board-member, and officer roles for founders who cite nonprofit governance experience as part of their bio.
- CourtListener — federal and state court docket aggregator. Civil-litigation surface by name and prior-employer association. Framed as litigation activity, never adjudicated wrongdoing. Strong defamation guardrails apply.
- OpenAlex and PubMed — for technical and research-credentialed founders. Publication record, citation depth, co-author network. Useful for deep-tech and bio-tech founder diligence where prior research is part of the investment thesis.
- NIH RePORTER — for founders with named-investigator or principal-investigator history on federal grants. Common for bio-tech founder diligence.
- Press archive via NewsAPI and Google News — long-tail press surface for founder-public-conduct review and prior-employer-context cross-reference.
Federal-Primary sources carry the highest weight. Authoritative-Secondary sources include Crunchbase, AngelList, ProductHunt, GitHub, OpenAlex, and the major podcast archives. Aggregator sites are signal, not verdict. Unverified claims are tagged. The methodology page is the long-form version of this list.
Sample report walkthroughs
The canonical founder-diligence sample is Dario Amodei, co-founder and chief executive of Anthropic, prior leadership at OpenAI and Google Brain. The full Founder Vetting Report v2 runs the entire source taxonomy and the executive-history overlay since the subject has both founder and senior-leadership records. Useful as a reading reference for VC associates assembling their first memo-prep diligence with the report.
For a small-company founder reference contrast, see the Saul Fleischman Founder Vetting Report. For a co-investor or follow-on PE counterparty reference, see the Vista Equity Partners PE Firm Vetting Report — useful as a reading reference for the firm-level diligence overlay when a PE counterparty enters a portfolio company's cap table.
Pricing for this use case
Founder Snapshot
30 credits. Returns in roughly two minutes. Verified company-of-record, founding date, role, headline traction signal, top public-record consistency check. The right tier for deal-screen triage where the partner has not yet committed to deeper diligence and wants a fast consistency check before scheduling the second meeting.
Founder Vetting Report v2
200 credits. Returns in five to eight minutes. Full source taxonomy across twelve sections. Cap-table presence where public, technical-contribution detail, prior co-founder relationships, prior funding history, prior litigation surface, public-conduct surface, defamation-aware framing. The right tier for memo-prep diligence and confirmatory diligence on every founder under serious consideration.
PE Firm Vetting Report
200 credits. Returns in five to eight minutes. Tuned for co-investor and counterparty diligence on PE firms entering or considering entry into a portfolio company's cap table. Firm-level governance, prior-portfolio public-conduct surface, prior-portfolio litigation surface, fund-history cross-reference, partner-roster verification. Use when a PE counterparty is a material part of the cap-table picture.
Volume packs and fund-level subscriptions
Credit packs scale to fund-level diligence volume. Fund subscriptions provide a per-quarter credit grant tuned to deal-flow size and include the multi-Den team workspace. Enterprise tiers add the institutional comparison library, custom rubric templates, and white-label delivery to LP reporting if needed. See the full pricing page for credit-pack options and fund-subscription tier comparison.
Mini case studies
The series-A firm building a memo on a three-co-founder deal
A series-A-stage venture firm staffs memo prep on a co-founder team of three with six business days to investment committee. The senior associate runs Founder Vetting Reports on each of the three co-founders for 600 credits total. The reports surface a prior co-founder relationship that the deck had not mentioned but that has no conflict surface, a clean shipped-product history on the technical co-founder anchored by GitHub and ProductHunt, and a public-conduct surface on the third co-founder anchored to two podcast appearances and an industry-conference talk consistent with her stated narrative. The memo gets written on a fuller picture than the associate's prior ad-hoc diligence delivered. The partner asks one targeted question on the prior relationship in the next-round call. The deal proceeds to term sheet.
The seed firm running diligence-at-volume on a thirty-deal pipeline
A seed-stage firm that screens roughly thirty deals per quarter at the deal-screen stage uses Founder Snapshot at 30 credits per founder for first-pass consistency checks across the partner-meeting pipeline. Across a quarter the firm runs roughly fifty-five snapshots for 1,650 credits. Three return inconsistencies severe enough to deprioritize the deal without further investment. Twelve return clean and the deals proceed to second-meeting evaluation. Forty return clean and feed into the firm's saved-references library for future cross-reference. The diligence-at-volume layer never replaces partner judgment on the deals that proceed; what it does is sharpen the consistency check on the deals that should not.
Frequently asked questions
Why does a VC team need a public-record founder vetting report?
Because the founder is the largest single variable in the investment decision, and the founder's pitch is the most curated artifact in the diligence file. A public-record vetting report assembles the founder's verifiable history — prior shipped products, prior co-founder relationships, prior funding history, governance roles, prior litigation surface, public-conduct record — into a single reading document the investment committee can review in five to eight minutes.
How does this fit into a typical VC diligence workflow?
It fits between the deal-screen and the term-sheet. After the partner has decided to lean in but before counsel has been engaged for confirmatory diligence, the vetting report is the right tier of artifact for the investment-committee memo. For confirmatory diligence after term-sheet signing, the same report supplements counsel's work with public-record context that legal diligence is not designed to surface.
What sources does the report cite?
Crunchbase, AngelList, ProductHunt, GitHub commit history, the founder's public X bio history, podcast appearance archives, USPTO records, SEC EDGAR for any public-company executive history, IRS Form 990 records for nonprofit governance, OpenAlex for academic credentials, CourtListener for civil litigation surface, and the press archive via NewsAPI and Google News.
Is this a substitute for legal diligence?
No. Confirmatory legal diligence is a distinct artifact run by counsel post-term-sheet. The public-record vetting report supplements the legal diligence layer with shipped-product verification, governance-role cross-reference, public-conduct review, and prior-coverage pattern that legal diligence is not designed to assemble.
Will the founder know we ran a report?
No. Reports are private to the buying firm. Founders are not notified that a report was run on them. The report cites only public records the founder or their employers have already published.
What does it cost?
A Founder Snapshot is 30 credits and returns in roughly two minutes. A full Founder Vetting Report v2 is 200 credits. The PE Firm Vetting Report, used for diligence on a co-investing or follow-on PE counterparty, is 200 credits. Volume credit packs are available, with fund-level subscriptions documented on the pricing page.
Can the founder dispute the report?
Every claim in the report cites the source URL it came from. If the founder believes a public-record citation is incorrect, the source URL is the place to begin. The methodology page documents the disambiguation hard-gate, the four-class source taxonomy, and the defamation framework that governs how allegations are framed.
What is the defamation framework?
Reports use a four-class source taxonomy and a probability yardstick adapted from the UK Professional Head of Intelligence Assessment framework. Civil-litigation citations are framed as litigation activity, never as adjudicated wrongdoing. Aggregator and forum sources are signal, never verdict. The methodology page is published in full.