STEP 01
Set the date
Establish the historical financing date being tested.
How we test Pitchzy
Testing the committee without hindsight.
Pitchzy is designed to surface the questions, evidence gaps and assumptions that may matter in an investor conversation.
To test that reasoning, we use historical fundraising situations while deliberately withholding what happened afterwards.
The question
Could the important questions have been seen at the time?
The purpose of the exercise is not to ask whether Pitchzy can identify future winners or losers.
It is to test whether the committee can surface material investment questions, recognise the evidence already available and identify important uncertainties using only information that could reasonably have been known at the time of the financing.
The method
Freeze the information. Hide the outcome.
STEP 02
Freeze the evidence
Use only information that was available or reasonably knowable at that point in time.
STEP 03
Withhold the future
Do not provide later growth, failure, financing, exit or other subsequent company outcomes to the committee.
STEP 04
Run the committee
Present the frozen information to Pitchzy and examine the questions, follow-ups and investor-readiness assessment it produces.
The historical outcome is not used to tell the committee what it should conclude.
What we look for
We test the reasoning, not the prediction.
Evidence recognition
Does the committee recognise meaningful evidence already demonstrated by the company?
Material uncertainties
Does it surface questions that could materially affect the investment case?
Stage calibration
Does the burden of evidence reflect what can reasonably be expected at that stage?
Question quality
Do the questions and follow-ups respond to the evidence actually provided rather than follow a generic checklist?
Capital reasoning
Does the assessment distinguish between capital needed to validate unresolved assumptions and capital intended to accelerate something already showing evidence?
What this is not
Historical testing is not prediction.
This methodology does not establish that Pitchzy can predict startup success, investment returns or future company outcomes.
It does not attempt to determine whether an investor should have invested in a historical company.
A strong company can still contain unresolved risks. A company that later struggles may have shown credible evidence at the time.
The test is narrower:
Could the important evidence, assumptions and unanswered questions have been identified using only what was knowable then?
What we learned
The tests changed the system.
Historical testing is used as a diagnostic tool for Pitchzy itself.
Across the test cases, it helped expose where the assessment needed better calibration, including how positive evidence is accumulated, how missing evidence is treated, how stage affects the burden of proof, how capital is interpreted and how the severity of unresolved questions is classified.
Those observations were used to refine the committee reasoning.
Current test set
6 historical fundraising cases.
The current historical test set spans different startup situations, stages and evidence profiles.
Each case is reconstructed using information available around the relevant financing date and evaluated without providing the committee with subsequent company outcomes.
The principle
Investment readiness is not the absence of unanswered questions.
It is the strength of demonstrated evidence relative to stage, weighed against the consequence of what remains unknown.
Ready to face the room?
Present your pitch. Defend your assumptions. See what holds up.