Securing investment for your startup is one of the most challenging hurdles a founder can face. Gaining access to venture capitalists and angel investors often requires a direct, professional, and persistent approach. While warm introductions are ideal, they aren’t always possible, leaving you with the task of reaching out to people who have never even heard of you or your startup.
Luckily, modern cold outreach platforms have transformed this process, saving teams not only from slow manual work, but also from the repetitive, impersonal messaging of traditional templates. With new AI-powered features, you can send highly personalized messages at scale, track engagement, and ensure your pitches land in primary inboxes. In this article, we’ll look at the best tools you can use for a successful round of fundraising.
What Is Cold Email Outreach for Fundraising?
In the context of fundraising, “cold email outreach” is the practice of contacting potential investors with whom you have no prior relationship. The goal is to introduce your company, capture their interest, and secure a meeting that will hopefully lead to investment.
Unlike traditional sales, outreach to investors requires a higher degree of personalization and credibility. Your email must quickly convey your value proposition, traction, and why you are specifically contacting that investor. The right software helps you manage this delicate process efficiently, ensuring your message is compelling, deliverable, and easy to track.
Top 5 Cold Email Outreach Tools for Landing Investment
Here are the best tools to power your investor outreach campaigns in 2025.
1. Instantly
Instantly is a powerful AI-powered platform focused on scaling your outreach campaigns without sacrificing deliverability. For founders, its standout feature is the unlimited email account warm-up. This process gradually and continuously builds your sending reputation, ensuring your emails to top-tier VCs don’t get flagged as spam.
Instantly also offers robust campaign analytics, allowing you to see what’s working and what isn’t in real-time. You can track open rates, reply rates, and link clicks to optimize your pitch and follow-up strategy. Its straightforward interface helps you manage a high volume of personalized outreach, making it ideal for running a broad but targeted fundraising campaign.
The platform is well-priced for startups, allowing you to start with a Growth plan for just $30 per month and level up as your business scales.
2. Saleshandy
Saleshandy excels at creating and managing sophisticated, multi-stage email sequences. When contacting investors, a single email is rarely enough. Saleshandy allows you to automate a series of personalized follow-ups that stop automatically once an investor replies. This leaves your sales team with more time to focus on finding new leads and responding to those who reply.
The platform provides a deliverability score for your emails before you send them, checking for spam triggers and other issues. For founders, this pre-send check is invaluable for protecting your domain’s reputation, which can spiral quickly when messages get sent to the spam folder. With detailed A/B testing, you can experiment with different subject lines and body copy to find the message that resonates most with your target investors.
3. Mailshake
Mailshake is an excellent tool for founders who want to combine email outreach with social media touchpoints. The platform allows you to integrate LinkedIn and phone calls into your outreach sequences, creating a multi-channel approach to building relationships with investors. You can automate connection requests or profile views on LinkedIn alongside your email cadence.
Its AI-powered writing assistant, SHAKEspeare, helps you draft compelling email copy quickly, saving you time to focus on strategy. It also provides a clear, unified dashboard to monitor all your campaign activities and lead progress, making it easy to manage conversations and identify the warmest investor leads.
4. Apollo.io
Apollo.io is an all-in-one sales intelligence and engagement platform, making it a powerhouse for founders who want to streamline their entire fundraising process. Its primary advantage is combining a massive, searchable database of contacts with a robust outreach sequencer. This means you can handle both prospecting and outreach within a single tool.
You can use its extensive filters to identify potential investors by their firm, investment focus, or title, and then directly add them to a personalized email campaign without ever leaving the platform. Apollo also provides verified email addresses and direct-dial phone numbers, saving countless hours on manual research.
5. Breakcold
Breakcold is built around the concept of “social selling” and is perfect for founders who prioritize building genuine rapport over high-volume outreach. It aggregates a prospect’s LinkedIn and Twitter activity into a single feed, allowing you to engage with their content (likes, comments) directly from the platform before sending your first email.
This “warm-up” approach makes your eventual outreach feel less cold and more like a natural continuation of a conversation. It also gives your investors plenty to find when they inevitably research you before deciding to respond. Breakcold unifies all interactions, from social media engagement to email replies, into one inbox, giving you a complete history of your relationship with each potential investor.
Final Thoughts
Choosing the right outreach tool can significantly impact the success of your fundraising efforts. It needs to give you scalability, affordability, and high deliverability to make sure your messages reach all of their intended recipients.
Instantly delivers in all of these aspects, running continuous warmup campaigns that ensure natural human interactions are always tied to your sending domain. And with unlimited email accounts, you can scale your outreach (both to investors and customers) seamlessly as your company grows. Combined with its simple UI and affordable pricing, these features put Instantly securely at the top of this list.
Securing investment is a large-scale project that requires your attendance at many in-person events and your attention during various calls and meetings. With an automated outreach tool, you can focus on these tasks with peace of mind, knowing that your team is constantly finding new leads to keep the process rolling.
