Remote Raise: What Happens When a Pitch Night Moves to Zoom

Seven startups, forty investors and no room: what Raise Ventures’ first online investor event taught us about pitching over Zoom.

Published on July 09, 2020

Seven startups, forty investors, no room. On Thursday 18 June, Raise Ventures ran its investor pitch event entirely on Zoom. It was called Remote Raise, it was the sixth Raise pitching event in three years, and it was never supposed to happen this way.

Raise Ventures title card: Remote Raise 00001, 2020, remoteraise.com — The title card from Raise Ventures’ recording of the first Remote Raise, 18 June 2020.

Plan A was a room in Belfast

I’ve been working with Raise Ventures, the privately-run startup accelerator in Belfast’s Cathedral Quarter, on their marketing, content and digital tools. The spring pitch event was due to be held in Belfast in April: founders on their feet, investors in the seats. Lockdown put an end to that.

Instead it moved online. Armour, Machine Eye, Journey Protector, Pryntd, Upskill, Stable Innovations and UMA each pitched over Zoom to an audience of 40 angels and funds. The recording is on the Raise YouTube channel.

The thing nobody expected

The audience travelled further than any room would have let it. In Raise’s own words afterwards, it “came from far and wide, US, UK, Ireland and Europe”. An angel in the US or mainland Europe is not getting on a plane for a Thursday evening in Belfast. They will give you ninety minutes on a laptop.

For Northern Ireland startups that is not a small thing. The local investor pool is what it is. An online pitch night quietly removes the geography.

What I’d tell anyone running a pitch event on Zoom

Rehearse the technology as well as the pitch. Every founder does a full run-through on the actual call, with the actual slides, on the actual wifi. The pitch that dies on the night almost always died of screen-sharing.

Keep the clock brutal. In a room, an overrunning pitch is awkward. On Zoom, it is a closed laptop. Short pitches, a hard stop, questions straight after while the investor still remembers the name.

Give people somewhere to go afterwards. The point of a pitch night is the conversations that come after the pitches. Follow up the same day with the deck, the founder’s contact details and the recording, because there is no bar to bump into each other at.

Record everything. The investors who couldn’t make it are as valuable as the ones who could. A pitch on YouTube keeps working after the call ends.

What’s next

More of them, I’d expect. I suspect that even when rooms are allowed again, the stream stays on. Once investors in three time zones have seen your startups, you don’t un-invite them.

From the archive: written up in 2026 from our notes and records of the time, and dated to when it happened.