About Raaise

G'day. We're a small team
with one stubborn idea.

That the money should reach the people fixing the planet faster than it currently does. We've been at it since 2020.

Where this came from.

2019

We'd been living and working in northern Mozambique for the best part of two decades when Cyclone Kenneth came through. It flattened communities that had done close to nothing to cause the climate crisis.

Standing in the middle of that, the inequity of it is not an abstraction. The people carrying the worst of this are the people who caused the least of it. We came out of it certain about one thing. The money has to reach the people fixing this, and it has to get there faster.

2020

So we built Raaise. A platform to connect pro-planet founders with the investors who actually back their kind of company. No commissions, no gatekeepers, no standing between a founder and the person writing the cheque.

We raised for it ourselves, which is how two family offices and a small VC ended up on our cap table. That part matters more than it sounds. It means we've sat on the wrong side of a diligence process, sweating a document request on a Friday afternoon, the same as everyone we work with.

Getting in front of the right investors was only ever half the job.

Since

Founders came through the platform, got in front of exactly the right investors, and lost them in the first five minutes over things nobody ever told them about. Then went out to the next twenty with the same problem still sitting in the deck.

We also started writing the notes investors read before deciding whether to take a meeting. Sitting in that chair for a while teaches you something uncomfortable: how fast the decision actually happens, and how rarely the founder ever hears the real reason.

Now

The Startup Health Check is what came out of that. The diligence an investor would run on you, run early, for you rather than about you. It's the thing we wish we could have handed every founder who came through Raaise and didn't get funded.

Request a Health Check →

The three of us.

Every Health Check is read and written by a Raaise founder. It isn't outsourced, and it isn't a template with your name dropped into it.

Amy Carter-James

Co-founder & CEO

Amy's the skipper. Two decades living and working in northern Mozambique, running a business somewhere the climate crisis was never theoretical. Cyclone Kenneth is the reason Raaise exists and Amy is the reason it got built. Infectiously optimistic, which turns out to be useful in this line of work.

Neal Carter-James

Co-founder & CSO

Behind the scenes, Neal's normally building something: a financial model, some tech, a brand asset. He's the one who takes a deck apart and finds the number on slide eleven that doesn't reconcile with the number on slide seven. Which is, more or less, the whole Health Check.

Ben Keene

Co-founder & CMO

Ben heads up all things community and will happily talk to founders, investors and pretty much anyone else about startups, the climate crisis and how we might go about solving it. He's the reason Raaise has a network rather than a mailing list.

Elsewhere

Impact at Scale · podcast Amy on the number one mistake founders make raising climate capital OnImpact Raaise helps climate-tech startups get investor-ready

Both sides of the tableWe've raised for Raaise ourselves, with two family offices and a small VC on the cap table. We've also written the notes investors read before taking a meeting.

Three lenses, every timeAngels, family offices and venture funds read the same deck and reach different conclusions. Every review runs through all three, not just the one you asked about.

Nothing leaves the roomYour materials are never shared with investors, never reused as an example, never put on the platform. Deleted on request.

The platform is still running.

Raaise powers investment platforms for organisations running their own deal flow, white-labelled and built on what we learned the hard way.

If you're an accelerator, an investor group or an ecosystem operator and you want your own version of it, come and talk to us.

AgriSpace and Blue Earth both run on it. Existing members can log in here.

Thinking about raising?

Find out what an investor is going to see, while you can still do something about it.