equityflow

understand the flow and follow it

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raised (USD)

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deals

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countries

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top sector

Where Money
Flows.

Ideas, capital, people and the economies behind them, from bootstrapped to IPO. A reference portal, open to everyone.

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the data, live

Slice 20,000+ deals any way you want

By sector, by stage from pre-seed to growth, by country, by who's writing the cheque (VCs, angels, funds), and stack them however you like. Click to build your own slice, or just watch it cycle.

0 rounds median —

build · 0 to 1

Want to build one of these companies?

A practical playbook, written to be used and not just read: how to find your first customers, which channels actually work, how much to raise at each stage, and how the fastest companies scale. Real mechanics, real case studies, short exercises.

go-to-market 0→1 paid vs organic channels SEO, GEO & SEM fundraising pre-seed → B blitzscaling customer psychology business & revenue models

your founder journey

From an idea to a company, the whole path

Everything around the deals: learn how it actually works, get in the room, find your people, and put your idea out there. All live, all in one place.

or jump straight to

date	company		stage	amount	sector	investors

filed / announced	company		expected raise	sector	note

filing e annunci concreti di quotazione imminente (S-1, F-1, SPAC, prospetti), niente rumor

date	acquirer		target		deal value	sector	note

acquisizioni, merger e buyout con target in EU · US · HK · IL · SG, il valore è spesso non dichiarato

investor	type	deals	led	rounds joined*	categories	geography	stages	last

* total size of the rounds the investor joined, not their own check, which is rarely public. A $100K follower in an $80B round still counts the full round here. Click an investor to see their deals.

batch	company		what they do	industry	team	status	raised*

* "raised" = rounds after YC tracked in our DB (auto-followed on each /ingest)

learn & work · build

Building 0→1, a practical playbook

Not theory for its own sake. Each block below is built to be used: the mechanics of a channel or a round, a case study that shows it working (or failing), a framework summarized with a link to the original, and a short exercise to run this week. This is v1, it will go much deeper.

The playbook, section by section

Each phase of the journey as its own deep page: the real options, examples from companies that did it, and the books and essays that teach it.

① Go-to-market, 0→1

At 0→1 your only job is to find one channel that works and a message that converts. Founders die spreading thin across ten channels. Go deep on one, get to a repeatable CAC < ⅓ of LTV, then add the next.

Paid acquisition, pick by where intent lives

Meta (Facebook / Instagram)

Interest + lookalike + broad targeting, creative-led (the ad is the targeting). Best for impulse / visual / consumer with a clear "before-after". Watch: creative fatigue, iOS attribution loss.

Google Search (SEM)

Captures existing demand, people already searching the problem. Highest-intent, usually best payback. Best when there's a keyword for what you do. Watch: competitive CPCs, brand-bidding.

TikTok

Cheap top-of-funnel + virality; native, unpolished creative wins. Gen-Z & younger consumer, discovery-driven. Great for awareness/seeding, weaker on direct high-ticket conversion.

High-intent visual discovery with long consideration windows, DTC, home, beauty, weddings, food. Female-skewed, planning mindset. Underpriced for the right commerce product.

Offline / OOH & field

Billboards, transit, events, field sales. For trust, local density, or enterprise. Hard to attribute → use geo-holdouts & promo codes. Underrated for B2B and category creation.

Unconventional

Community, partnerships, referral loops, waitlists, "do things that don't scale" (PG). Often the real unlock at 0→1: Airbnb shooting hosts' photos by hand, Superhuman's concierge onboarding.

Organic, compounding, slower, durable

SEO

Content + programmatic pages that rank. Slow to start, compounds for years, near-zero marginal CAC once it works. Moat when you own the long tail of your category's queries.

Organic social

Audience built without ad spend: content, community and founder-led "build in public" on LinkedIn (B2B), X (tech), TikTok/IG/YouTube (consumer). Slow and consistency-dependent, but it compounds into trust, distribution and lower CAC, and feeds your paid creative.

GEO, Generative Engine Optimization

The new frontier: being cited inside ChatGPT / Perplexity / AI answers, not just ranked on a blue link. Structured facts, clear entity pages, being the source others quote. SEO for the LLM era.

Branding & PR, the multiplier on every channel

Easy to dismiss as "later", but branding and PR don't replace a working channel, they make every channel cheaper and every round easier. Treat them as leverage, not vanity.

Branding

The promise + the feeling people attach to you. It's a CAC multiplier: trust lifts conversion, recall makes re-acquisition cheap, distinctiveness earns pricing power, and a strong brand pulls talent and capital. Consistency of voice, visual and positioning compounds from day one. See: Liquid Death (the brand is the product), Stripe's developer brand, Notion's community aesthetic.

PR & earned media

Narrative and third-party credibility: launches (Product Hunt, embargoed press), founder thought-leadership, and milestones as moments, a funding round is as much PR as it is cash. Works for category creation, recruiting and investor signal. Vanity when there's no product or distribution behind it: PR amplifies traction, it doesn't manufacture it.

Exercise, the one-channel test. Define your ICP in one sentence. Pick the single channel where their intent lives. Set CAC target = LTV ÷ 3. Run a $1,000 test with 3 creatives / angles. Measure CAC and payback period. Kill it or double it, don't add a second channel until the first is repeatable.

② Growth theory & case studies

Blitzscaling , Reid Hoffman & Chris Yeh

Deliberately prioritize speed over efficiency in a winner-take-most market: tolerate burn, chaos and imperfect ops to capture the market before rivals. Works with network effects, high margins and a real land-grab (LinkedIn, Airbnb, Uber, Stripe). Kills you without unit economics or a winner-take-all dynamic, the cautionary tale is WeWork: blitzscaled spend onto a business with no defensibility.

original ›

Bullseye / 19 channels , "Traction", Weinberg & Mares

List all 19 traction channels, rank into an inner/middle/outer ring, run cheap tests on the inner ring, then pour budget into the one that works. Antidote to channel-FOMO.

original ›

Crossing the Chasm , Geoffrey Moore

The gap between early adopters (buy vision) and the mainstream (buy proof + references). Win one beachhead niche completely before broadening, most startups stall in the chasm.

summary ›

Exercise, should you blitzscale? Answer three questions: (1) Is this winner-take-most (network effects / strong economies of scale)? (2) Are gross margins high enough to survive the burn? (3) Is a competitor about to take the land? Two+ "no" → build durably, don't blitzscale. Three "yes" → speed is the strategy.

③ Fundraising, what each stage actually buys

You don't raise "money", you raise against a milestone. Each round buys you the proof needed to unlock the next. Sizes are rough 2024-26 norms.

stage	what you're proving	typical raise	instrument
Pre-seed	Team + insight + a wedge. Conviction in you and the problem.	$100k – $1.5M	SAFE / angels & pre-seed funds
Seed	Early signs of product-market fit: retention, organic pull, first revenue.	$1.5M – $5M	SAFE / priced seed
Series A	A repeatable GTM engine, predictable CAC/LTV, ~$1-2M ARR, strong growth.	$8M – $20M	priced (preferred equity)
Series B	Scale the proven model, expand the team/markets, efficient growth (T2D3-style).	$20M – $50M+	priced

Reference reading: YC, Guide to Seed Fundraising · Venture Deals (Feld & Mendelson) for terms · Secrets of Sand Hill Road (Scott Kupor) for how VCs think · the SAFE (YC).

Exercise, name your milestone. Write the single metric that, if true in 12-18 months, makes the next round obvious (e.g. "$1.5M ARR growing 15%/mo"). Size this round as the runway to reach it + buffer. If you can't name the metric, you're not ready to raise, you're ready to build.

④ Frameworks library, summarized, linked to source

How YC imagines a startup

"A startup is a company designed to grow fast" (PG). Default Alive vs Default Dead. Make something people want; do things that don't scale first.

PG: Startup = Growth ›

Do things that don't scale

Manually recruit, delight and serve your first users by hand. The unscalable work is what creates the early love that later compounds.

PG essay ›

Product-Market Fit

"The only thing that matters" (Andreessen; term by Rachleff). Before PMF, nothing else matters; after, almost nothing else does. Measure it (40% "very disappointed" test).

Andreessen ›

The Lean Startup

Build → Measure → Learn. Ship an MVP, get validated learning, iterate fast, pivot or persevere.

Ries ›

The Mom Test

How to talk to customers so they can't lie to you: ask about their life and past behaviour, never pitch your idea.

Fitzpatrick ›

T2D3

The SaaS scaling benchmark: triple, triple, double, double, double ARR, the path from ~$2M to $100M+ that earns the late-stage rounds.

Battery ›

The library grows as we go deeper, paid-creative teardowns, cohort/retention math and cap-table mechanics are next.

⑤ Customer psychology & the buyer prototype

You don't sell a product, you resolve a tension in someone's life. Before any channel works, you need a near-physical sense of who buys, why, and what they're really hiring you for.

Jobs to be Done

People "hire" a product to make progress on a job (Christensen's milkshake). Map the functional, emotional and social job, sell the progress, not the features.

The buyer prototype (not a demographic)

One vivid person: their pain, the trigger that makes them act today, the alternative they use now (often "a spreadsheet / nothing"), their budget, and, in B2B, who signs off vs who uses.

Emotion buys, logic justifies

B2C decides on emotion (status, fear, belonging) and rationalizes after. B2B buys risk reduction and career safety, "nobody got fired for choosing the safe vendor". Speak to both.

Persuasion levers (Cialdini)

Social proof, loss aversion, scarcity, anchoring, authority, reciprocity, commitment. Tools, not tricks, they lower the friction of a good decision, they don't save a bad product.

Exercise, one buyer, fully drawn. Write a single paragraph: name, the job they're hiring you for, the trigger event, what they do today instead, the emotion behind it, and who has to say yes. If you can't write it without guessing, you owe yourself 10 customer interviews (read The Mom Test first).

References: Jobs to be Done (Christensen) · Influence (Cialdini) · The Mom Test (Fitzpatrick).

⑥ Visual identity & brand archetypes

Identity is the system that makes you instantly recognizable; the archetype is the personality underneath it that keeps every decision consistent. Pick the archetype first, the visuals follow.

Visual identity, the system

The kit

Logo, colour palette, typography, imagery, motion and tone of voice, defined once, applied everywhere. Consistency > cleverness: recognition compounds only if it repeats.

Distinctive assets

A colour, shape or phrase you own (Stripe's gradients, Cash App's $, Mailchimp's Freddie). Fame is built on a few assets used relentlessly, not a rebrand every quarter.

The 12 archetypes (Jung · Mark & Pearson)

Choose one core archetype as your north star, it answers "how would we say this?" for every line of copy and every screen.

The drivers

Hero (Nike) · Outlaw (Harley, Liquid Death) · Magician (Disney, Apple) · Explorer (Patagonia, Jeep).

The connectors

Everyman (IKEA) · Lover (Chanel) · Jester (Old Spice) · Caregiver (Dove, Volvo).

The order-makers

Ruler (Rolex) · Creator (Lego, Adobe) · Sage (Google, The Economist) · Innocent (Coca-Cola, Aveeno).

Exercise, claim an archetype. Pick the one archetype that fits the change you create. Name three brands that share it. Then write your voice in one line ("we sound like __, never like __") and three palette/typography rules. Use it to audit your current homepage.

Reference: The Hero and the Outlaw (Margaret Mark & Carol Pearson).

⑦ Sector × channel fit, different worlds grow differently

The biggest 0→1 mistake is copying a playbook from the wrong sector. A deeptech company on TikTok and a DTC brand chasing conference talks both waste a year. Traction patterns are sector-specific.

sector	dominant traction pattern	where it grows
DeepTech / hard / biotech	Credibility over time: proof, papers, talent, strategic & grant capital. Long cycles.	Technical content, conferences, partnerships, LinkedIn, not viral social
Consumer / DTC	Fast feedback, visual, viral, brand-led. Creative is the growth lever.	Meta & TikTok ads, influencers, organic short-form, referral
B2B SaaS	Repeatable pipeline: content + SEO + sales, often product-led too.	SEO, founder-led LinkedIn/X, communities, outbound, PLG free tier
Fintech	Trust + compliance + partnerships; regulated, slower to scale.	Partnerships/embedded, SEO, performance + heavy trust signals
Marketplace	Solve the chicken-and-egg (usually seed supply first), then density.	Geographic launches, supply-side ops, SEO on inventory, referrals
Dev tools / infra	Bottom-up adoption by builders; docs and DX are the marketing.	Great docs, open source, GitHub, dev communities, technical content

Exercise, name the trap. Pin your sector and its dominant pattern above. Then write the one "obvious" channel everyone in your space tries that is actually a trap for you (e.g. paid social for deeptech), and the under-used channel that fits your motion. Commit to the second.

⑧ Business models, who pays, and how it shapes everything

The buyer model sets your CAC, your sales motion, your team and your fundraising story. Get clear on who actually pays before optimizing anything.

B2C

Sell to consumers. High volume, low price, emotion-driven, short decisions. Growth via paid/organic social & brand; the hard part is retention & CAC payback.

B2B

Sell to businesses. Lower volume, high ACV, ROI- and risk-driven, longer cycles, sales + success teams. The hard part is the pipeline and proving payback.

B2B2C

Sell to a business that puts you in front of its consumers (Stripe, Plaid, embedded finance). You borrow the partner's distribution, leverage, but you don't own the end-customer.

Marketplace

Connect two sides and take a cut. Network effects & defensibility, but cold-start is brutal, pick the constrained side and seed it manually.

Platform / API

Infrastructure others build on. Wins on reliability, docs and ecosystem; revenue scales with their success (usage-based).

B2G / enterprise

Sell to governments or large orgs. Huge contracts, procurement, very long cycles, needs runway and patience, but sticky once won.

Exercise, map your model. Write: who pays, who uses, average contract value, sales motion (self-serve vs sales-led), and the single hardest part of your model. That sentence should drive your next hire.

⑨ Revenue & growth models, how money and customers compound

How you charge

Subscription (SaaS)

Recurring MRR/ARR, predictable and high-multiple, but churn-sensitive. Watch net revenue retention (NRR >100% = you grow even without new logos).

Usage / consumption

Pay for what you use (AWS, Stripe, OpenAI). Revenue scales with the value delivered; lands small, expands automatically, but revenue is less predictable.

Transactional / take-rate

A cut of each transaction (marketplaces, payments). Grows with GMV; the take-rate is the whole game.

Freemium

Free tier as the funnel, paid tier for power users/teams. Works when usage creates the need to upgrade; dies when free is "good enough".

One-time / licensing / ads

Perpetual licence, or monetize attention. Simpler, but no compounding recurring base, harder to build enterprise value on.

How you grow & keep customers

Growth motion

PLG (product sells itself, self-serve), SLG (sales-led), marketing-led, community-led. Most scaled companies blend, but lead with one.

The funnel, AARRR

Acquisition → Activation → Retention → Revenue → Referral (McClure's pirate metrics). Retention is the engine: leaky retention makes every acquisition dollar wasted.

The unit-economics gates

LTV / CAC > 3, CAC payback < 12 months, gross margin high enough to fund growth. If these don't hold, more spend just loses money faster.

Exercise, your money model on one line. "We charge [model], our north-star metric is [X], CAC payback is [N] months, and retention/NRR is [Y]." Fill every blank with a real number. The blanks you can't fill are your roadmap.

References: AARRR / Pirate Metrics (Dave McClure) · product-led growth (OpenView) · Lenny's Newsletter for live playbooks.

community board · open to everyone

Open projects, papers, raises and ideas

the community-driven layer: projects looking for contributors, papers open for co-authors, founders raising money or talent, and raw ideas looking for a team. Post yours, the data is public and reviewed before it shows.

a personal note

It starts with awareness

Enrico Yu. Everything I've learned and seen from my high-school years through university: the failed projects, the friends I travelled with, the defeats and the glories. Shared.

Almost everyone I've met is building on something that was already a big part of their life. People who love music try to become better singers, musicians, producers. The ones who grew up on computers and games end up in software. Someone with a family business joins it, and maybe layers software on top to make it better. It's natural: you improve what you have. That's the point.

And yet many people walk away from their dreams, not for lack of talent, but because they don't know enough. Society rewards the lucky, born in the right environment at the right time, and it rewards the explorers, the ones who expect more from themselves and keep jumping into new challenges. Both deserve it. What I don't accept is what happens to everyone else: being quietly written off. Where there are enough resources and enough space, more opportunity grows the economy for everyone. Fights break out in narrow rooms, not open ones.

With this project I'd like, call it hubris, to help people do what they're actually good at. Maybe you hate travelling, so you never show up at the big hackathon. But if you can connect with the right people, or spot the one side event worth the trip, that extra step is suddenly within reach. The internet is already big enough, and AI is making everything more accessible; this site just tries to bring a little order.

It's a piece of my personal brain, shared: events I've been to and events I want to join, companies and stocks I check from time to time, VC and PE deals I follow for the simple joy of watching ideas get the resources they need. Sometimes you have to be smarter; sometimes you just follow the flow. Thinking outside the box is great when you need the solution nobody else sees. But first look inside the box: what resources do you have, to build what, for whom.

One more thing: balance. If you love what you do, "it's not just work". But that's a lie you can tell your brain for only so long. The athletes who became entrepreneurs all teach the same lesson: follow what your body needs: movement and interesting, even funny, input for neuroplasticity, real social life, for the right kind of dopamine. We can't have everything, and having all three is already a privilege, but we can help our body as much as possible. A sentence from biology stuck with me: you lose what you don't use. That's why this site also holds communities, hiking, volleyball, the occasional run, good food with good people, and the odd cocktail bar worth the detour.

For any question, idea, or just to say hi, write to me at enrico@equityflow.finance, I read everything. You can also find me on LinkedIn and X.

open by design

Built with the community

Every section accepts suggestions, tickets are open for improvements, and the data is public, refreshed monthly, and always linked to its sources.

open maintainer roles

Help turn the map into a living community

Social growth lead

Build distribution loops on LinkedIn, X and niche communities: turn data, essays and product updates into audience growth, contributors and partnerships.

News discovery editor

Find the week's useful signals: deals, IPOs, M&A, programs, conferences and resources worth curating.

Community discovery manager

Surface clubs, founders, students, events and people who should be connected to the ecosystem.

editorial inspiration

Inspired by the spirit of Breaking Italy: not live-updated data or breaking news, but a curated view of what is worth understanding. The week and month pages are picks from me and the team: stories, companies, markets, events and ideas we think deserve attention.

contributors

People shaping the data and the sections. Anyone can help: suggest, fix, add a source.

keep it going

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