Six questions to ask before you wire

You are not going to run institutional diligence on a twenty-five thousand dollar angel check, and you should not. But there is a short list of questions that a first read of most seed decks should raise, and asking them before you wire is the difference between a considered no and an expensive yes.

1. Where is the revenue concentrated

Get the top customers as a share of total. A round ARR number can be one or two logos. This is first because it is the risk most often hidden in the topline and the easiest to size in one question.

2. What does the retention curve actually do

Net retention and logo churn tell you whether growth compounds or leaks. Monthly logo churn above two to three percent annualizes into a number that undoes a lot of new-logo growth. Ask which segment churns and why.

3. Where does the market number come from

A large top-down TAM built from a total spend pool is a headline, not a plan. Ask for the bottom-up version: how many realistic customers times realistic spend. A founder who has done that math is a good sign; a founder who bristles at the question is a different one.

4. What is the gross margin, and what is in COGS

For an AI-heavy product, inference cost lives in COGS and can hold margin well below software norms. Ask how much of cost is inference that falls with scale versus services that do not. It tells you what the business looks like at ten times the size.

5. Do the founders fit this market

Founder-market fit is the hardest thing to fix after the fact. In a regulated or relationship-driven market especially, ask how the team closes the domain gap, and who owns the relationships the business depends on. One advisor is not usually the whole answer.

6. What is the ask, and what does it buy

The round size and what it is meant to reach tells you whether the plan is grounded. A raise that gets to the next obvious milestone with margin is a different bet from one that needs everything to go right.

Six questions on a first read catches most of what a slow weekend would catch. The slow weekend is for the deal you have already decided is worth one.

When to slow down and do the work

There are deals where this list is not enough, and it is worth knowing which. A large check relative to your portfolio. Anything where you are pricing the round rather than following. A market you do not understand at all. A founder you have a private doubt about. For those, the six questions are where you start, not where you stop.

For everything else, the read above is most of the value, and it is what Meridian assembles for you: the numbers pulled, the risks ranked, and the questions in the order to ask them, so the first hour is spent thinking rather than reading.