Investor Ready Audit
Entry-level diagnosticA focused diagnostic of your fundraising readiness. We stress-test how an investor will see your company today and hand you a clear, prioritized action plan to close the gaps before you go to market.
We prepare high-potential companies to raise capital and connect with the right investors.
Sentinel Ventures is a deal-sourcing and fundraising-readiness firm helping startups and growth companies become investment-ready before approaching VC funds, family offices, and strategic investors.
What we do
We get companies genuinely ready to raise.
We help founders and management teams prepare, structure, and present their fundraising the way institutional investors expect to see it — then, when a company is genuinely ready, we introduce it to relevant investors on a selective, fit-driven basis.
Full Fundraising Pack
End-to-end preparationThe complete preparation of your raise — the materials, the structure, and the strategy that let you approach investors with confidence and stay in control of your own process.
Success Fee
Optional, aligned upsideAn optional, fully aligned component. Where legally permitted and agreed in writing, we take a percentage of the capital successfully raised — so our upside is tied to your outcome, never charged as a condition of the preparation work.
Our thesis
Our thesis is our filter — we prepare and source the companies rebuilding critical digital infrastructure.
Every layer of the digital economy — identity, code, models, networks, and money itself — is now contested terrain, and most of the tooling meant to defend it was designed for a slower, smaller attack surface. AI has changed the physics on both sides: it is the largest new attack surface in a generation and the most capable defensive primitive since the firewall. At the same time, finance is going programmable — payments, settlement, and real-world assets are being rebuilt on new rails that have to be secure and compliant from the first block. This is the view that guides who we take into the process: we prepare and source technical companies building security, infrastructure, and financial rails for that reality — the same companies we would one day want to back.
01
Securing the AI stack
As AI moves into production, it creates attack surfaces that legacy security tools were never built to see: autonomous agents that take actions, models that can be poisoned or extracted, and data pipelines with no provenance. We back teams building the identity, guardrails, and runtime controls for software that reasons and acts on its own.
Agent identity, authorization, and runtime governanceLLM/model red-teaming, evaluation, and runtime defenseData-poisoning and supply-chain integrity for training and RAG pipelines
02
Autonomous defense
The economics of security have inverted — attackers now hold the same generative tooling as defenders, while SOC teams can't hire their way out of alert volume. We fund applied-AI teams that compress detection, triage, and response from hours to seconds, and that treat the analyst as an operator of many agents rather than a queue of tickets.
Agentic SOC and autonomous alert triageAI-native detection engineering and threat huntingContinuous, autonomous offensive testing and red teaming
03
Critical digital infrastructure
The systems the economy actually runs on — machine identity, the software supply chain, cryptography, and the network fabric — are brittle, opaque, and increasingly targeted by nation-state and criminal actors. We back the foundational layer: infrastructure that is verifiable, resilient, and secure by default rather than by audit.
Machine and non-human identity at scaleSoftware supply-chain provenance, signing, and SBOMPost-quantum and cryptographic infrastructure
For founders
Who we work with.
The process is built for teams with real fundamentals that need their fundraising to match. If any of these sound like you, you should apply.
- Startups preparing for a Seed, Series A, or growth round.
- SMEs and family businesses seeking strategic capital.
- Companies with strong fundamentals but weak or outdated investor materials.
- Founders who want to run a structured, professional fundraising process rather than improvise it.
Our process
A structured path from apply to raise.
- 01Step 1
Apply
Tell us about your company, your raise, and your timeline. Intake is selective and thesis-driven — we take on companies we believe we can genuinely help.
- 02Step 2
Investor Ready Audit
We diagnose your fundraising readiness the way an investor will, and hand you a prioritized plan to close the gaps.
- 03Step 3
Full Fundraising Pack
We prepare your materials, financial model, data room, and strategy to an institutional standard, so your story holds up under scrutiny.
- 04Step 4
Investor targeting & preparation
We build a qualified, relevant investor target list and rehearse you for the questions and diligence that follow the first meeting.
- 05Step 5
Selective investor presentation
When you are genuinely ready and there is a real fit, we introduce you to relevant investors — selectively, on the basis of quality and readiness.
- 06Step 6
Success fee — only if applicable
Where legally compliant and agreed in writing, an optional success fee aligns us entirely with a successful raise. It is never a condition of the preparation work.
Why work with us
Institutional preparation, without an institution's price.
01
Institutional-quality preparation
Materials, a financial model, and a data room built to the standard investors actually expect — not a template.
02
Clear investor positioning
A sharp, credible narrative and valuation logic that survive a skeptical first read.
03
A structured fundraising process
You run a deliberate, well-paced process and stay in control of it, instead of reacting to whoever replies first.
04
Qualified investor targeting
A relevant, well-matched list of VC funds, family offices, and strategic investors — never a mass-blasted spray.
05
Due-diligence readiness
Prepared for the questions before they are asked, so momentum survives the move from interest to term sheet.
06
A long-term partner
We work with companies aligned to our long-term investment view, and stay close to the best of them well beyond a single raise.
Future fund vision
Building the fund in the right order.
We are not a VC fund yet. We are building the platform, reputation, and proprietary deal flow to become one. Today, we help strong companies become investment-ready and reach the right investors through a professional, selective, and thesis-driven process.
Sentinel Ventures is being built in the right order. Before deploying capital, we are earning the trust of exceptional founders and serious investors — by doing the unglamorous work of getting companies genuinely ready to raise, and by only putting our name behind opportunities that meet a high bar.
Every engagement sharpens our judgment and deepens our network. Over time, that compounds into something a first-time fund rarely has on day one: a reputation as a trusted deal source and a pipeline of high-quality, thesis-aligned companies we have known and worked with long before they reach the broader market.
That proprietary deal flow is the foundation of the fund we intend to become. Until then, our incentives are simple and honest — we succeed when the companies we prepare succeed at raising on their own terms.
Insights
How we read the market we prepare companies for.
Team
The people who prepare your raise.
Juan Henao
FounderJuan founded Sentinel Ventures to close the gap between strong companies and the investors who should be funding them. He works directly with founders on positioning, materials, and fundraising strategy, and personally leads investor targeting for the companies the firm takes on — building, in the process, the reputation and proprietary deal flow behind the fund the firm intends to become.
Elena Vasquez
Partner, Fundraising StrategyElena has led and advised on more than fifty early-stage and growth raises, first as a startup operator through two rounds of her own and later on the platform team of a European venture fund. She owns the strategy behind each engagement — the round, the timeline, and the target list — and turns it into a process founders can actually run.
Index Ventures (Platform)Ex-founder
Priya Nair
Partner, Financial Modeling & ValuationPriya spent seven years in investment banking and corporate finance before moving to startup fundraising, where she has built the models behind dozens of Seed-to-Series-B raises. She makes the numbers defensible — the model and valuation logic that survive a partner meeting rather than trigger one.
Goldman SachsCorporate finance
Apply
Ready to raise on institutional terms?
Start with an Investor Ready Audit. We'll show you exactly how an investor sees your company today — and what to fix before you go to market.