If you’re a start-up seeking capital, a data room is a crucial tool to help speed up the due diligence process. It allows buyers or investors of your company to look over the documents and information in a structured manner, increasing your company’s perceived value and reducing the duration required to close an agreement.

No matter if you’re at the beginning or the end of stage 2, your investors will need access to a variety of documents. It is essential to find the most relevant documents, and then organize, collect and label them properly. No investor or authorized party would like to spend time sifting through a jumble of documents.

A business plan, financial reports as well as intellectual property www.peoplevdr.com/data-room-basics-for-startups/ information ownership and incorporation information and pitch decks are just a few of the most important documents. You may also wish to include previous investor updates, since they demonstrate that you are an honest and transparent business.

In addition to your data rooms, it is important to be cautious about who you grant access to. You can monitor the amount of duration of each document using a virtual dataroom (VDR) that has activity reporting.

Startups don’t realize that their intellectual property is valuable and should also be included in the virtual data room. This includes patent filings, trademarks and internal memos. Incorporating this information proves that you take your IP seriously and it can help increase your startup’s credibility in a negotiation.