We audit the financial model and pressure-test the deck the way an investment committee would, fix what we find, then take the company to family offices its VC network does not reach.
1Figures describe the aggregate target raise of campaigns Escher Capital has worked on — not capital raised, guaranteed, or under management — and may include work completed by our principals at prior firms. Past engagements are not a guarantee of future results.
These allocators keep no website, appear on no list, and answer a relationship rather than an approach. They underwrite on their own horizon, which suits a company whose value is compounding rather than spiking. Reaching them is built over years, and it is the part of this work that cannot be replicated from a founder's own contact list.
The team has prepared materials for institutional allocators and has run commercial and financial diligence for venture funds. The adversarial review is credible because we have sat in the seat that decides, and we know which question ends a process.
Two convenient locations in New York City: 25 Broadway, in the heart of Wall Street in the Financial District, and Third Avenue in Midtown, amidst the hedge funds. Founders on the West Coast and outside the United States use us for the same reason: the relationships that decide a private round are held in person, in this city, and they are worked from here every week.
A New York address is not decoration. Downtown puts us a block from the New York Stock Exchange for closings, Midtown puts us inside the hedge fund corridor on Third Avenue where allocator meetings are easiest to set, and both let a company based in San Francisco, London or Dubai run a campaign on East Coast time without opening an office here.
We cover the working day from Gulf morning to Pacific afternoon, so a process does not stall for a time zone. Where a family office prefers to meet at home, we travel to them.
Each phase produces something the company keeps. The campaign runs until the round closes.
We start with the numbers, because the numbers decide the conversation. The existing model gets audited line by line, then rebuilt so it holds under questioning.
The deck gets reviewed by people who have written pass memos. Weaknesses surface here, in a room where they cost nothing.
We take the company to allocators its own network does not reach, in a sequence built to create competitive tension rather than a queue of one-off meetings.
A first conversation takes forty minutes. We read the model and the deck beforehand and tell you where the argument breaks.