CPG Fundraising Data Room: What Consumer Investors Expect (2026)

CPG Fundraising Data Room: What Consumer Investors Expect

Last updated: August 2026

Quick answer. A CPG fundraising data room is a document hub, not an analytics dashboard — a place to upload thousands of documents, organize them once, gate the contracts behind an NDA, and reuse the same room across 40 investor conversations. It is inventory-and-distribution-shaped, not code-and-cohort-shaped: the evidence that carries the case is your scan data, retailer POs, distributor and co-packer agreements, trade-spend reconciliation, and formula ownership — not a retention curve. Build eight folders (corporate, financials with a deduction-adjusted P&L, sales & distribution, supply chain, brand & IP, compliance, team, and the deck), show the six metrics consumer investors actually read (velocity, ACV, gross margin, trade spend, contribution margin, repeat rate), and stage disclosure in three tiers. In the 2026 environment, consumer funding is selective and metrics-forward: US e-commerce/consumer-products VC fell ~97% from a 2021 peak above $5B to ~$130M in 2023 (Crunchbase News), and the median consumer seed round dropped below $1M in Q1 2025 (Carta). At friends-and-family scale a Google Drive folder is genuinely enough; the room earns its keep when contracts and scan data enter.

I'm Sean Yu, co-founder of Peony, a data room company serving 6,800+ customers. Before Peony I invested on the other side of this table — early-stage venture at Backed VC and growth equity at Target Global — and I spent a lot of time reading what consumer founders sent me when they were raising. So this guide is written from the seat you are trying to get into: what I looked for when a beauty, food, beverage, or supplement founder sent me their materials, what made a number credible versus a number I had to discount, and how the strongest founders organized a room that let me get to conviction fast instead of trading emails for three weeks.

Here is the thing most CPG founders get wrong, and it is the opposite of the tech-startup advice they have read. A consumer brand's fundraise is document-heavy. You are not a SaaS company whose entire story fits in a five-file room and a cohort table. You have co-packer agreements, broker agreements, distributor paperwork with UNFI and KeHE, retailer purchase orders, scan-data exports, trademark filings, and a P&L that only tells the truth after you subtract trade spend and deductions. The right tool for that is not a link-analytics dashboard — it is a place to upload everything, organize it once, NDA-gate the sensitive contracts, and reuse the same hub across every investor conversation and, later, across acquirers. That framing shapes this entire post.

One honest note before the folders. I sell the room, and I am still going to tell you that at the earliest stage you do not need it — a shared Drive folder is genuinely fine for a friends-and-family check. The room starts to matter when real contracts and scan data enter and several institutional investors are reading at once. I will be specific about where that line is.

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What do CPG investors actually expect in a data room in 2026?

They expect a tight, organized document hub built around eight folders, with a defensible number that is easy to verify — and in a selective 2026 market, "easy to verify" is the whole game. A consumer investor is not grading you against a SaaS benchmark. They are underwriting whether your velocity is real, whether your distribution holds, whether your margin survives trade spend, and whether the brand and formula are actually yours. The room's job is to answer those questions before they are asked, in a structure that reads in the order you chose.

Start with the environment, because it sets the tone for everything an investor brings to your materials. Consumer funding went through the steepest correction in the category's history: US e-commerce and consumer-products venture funding fell roughly 97% from a 2021 peak above $5 billion to roughly $130 million in 2023 (Crunchbase News), the median consumer seed round fell below $1 million in Q1 2025, seed-stage consumer funding was down 31% year-over-year in Q1 2025, and the seed-to-Series A timeline stretched to roughly three years — about double the 2022 pace (Carta, Q1 2025). The practical consequence for your room: investors are metrics-forward and skeptical, and a padded number or a missing contract does more damage now than it would have in the froth of 2021. A defensible, well-organized room is the cheapest edge you have.

Here is the hub in one view — the eight folders, and what each one answers for a consumer investor.

The CPG fundraise document hub (8 folders): 01. Corporate & Cap Table — who owns the company. 02. Financials — monthly P&L plus a deduction-adjusted P&L. 03. Sales & Distribution — distributor agreements (UNFI, KeHE), retailer POs, scan exports (Circana/SPINS/NielsenIQ). 04. Supply Chain — co-packer and broker agreements. 05. Brand & IP — trademarks and formula ownership. 06. Compliance — FDA/label/MoCRA where it applies. 07. Team & References — bios and pre-cleared contacts. 08. Deck & Memo — the first-touch artifact and the forwardable narrative.

The distinction that separates this from a generic investor room is what lives in folders 03 through 05. A data room for investors in the abstract is corporate, financial, legal, and IP. A CPG room's center of gravity is contracts and scan data — the distribution, supply-chain, and brand evidence that a consumer investor spends the most time on because it is where consumer businesses actually break. The rest of this post is folder-by-folder and metric-by-metric.

Which metrics decide whether you get the meeting?

Six metrics carry most of the weight — velocity, ACV, gross margin, trade spend, contribution margin, and repeat rate — and each one has a reading an investor applies before they trust the number. The definitions matter, because an investor who catches you using one loosely discounts everything after it. Here is each metric, its definition attributed to source, and the reading I applied when a founder put it in front of me.

Velocity. Velocity is units (or dollars) divided by the number of stores times the number of weeks — units per store per week — and syndicated providers report it as dollars per $MM ACV to normalize for store size, which is the standard because a case a week means something very different in a small natural grocer than in a Target (CPG Scout; NielsenIQ). What a velocity number has to clear: it has to be rising. The trend matters more than the absolute level, because a flat velocity in growing distribution means you are buying shelf you cannot sell through. And a high velocity in a handful of premium doors is not the same claim as the same number across a national footprint — the first is a promising test, the second is a business. When a founder showed me velocity, the first thing I looked for was the direction and the store count behind it.

ACV %. All-Commodity Volume percent is the share of total retail dollar-volume, across all products, in the stores that carry your item — a measure of distribution quality weighted by store size (NielsenIQ; All-Commodity Volume, Wikipedia). The reading here is the one I want every founder to internalize: ACV without velocity is vanity. A big ACV number tells me you got onto a lot of shelves; it tells me nothing about whether the product moves once it is there. Shelf you cannot sell through comes back off at the next reset. So I read ACV and velocity together, always, and a founder who leads with a distribution number and buries the velocity is usually hiding the velocity.

Gross margin. Category rules of thumb put food around 25-35%, beverage 40-55%, and beauty or prestige 60-80%, and published acquisition criteria like Taylor Sicard's look for gross margins in excess of 40% in a branded organic-growth business (Taylor Sicard). The category bands are illustrative — they vary by source and by how you account for freight and fulfillment — but the north-of-40% bar is the durable one. The reading: gross margin is your room to survive trade spend. A beverage brand at 45% has room to fund slotting and promotion; a food brand at 22% is going to get squeezed to zero contribution the moment a retailer demands a deduction. Margin is not vanity here — it is the buffer that everything downstream draws on.

Trade spend. Trade spend runs about 15-25% of gross sales for established CPG brands, and frequently exceeds 25% for emerging brands where slotting-heavy launches push it up (CPG Scout; Eightx). The single most important thing to state: trade spend is quoted on gross sales, not net — get the base wrong and the whole P&L is wrong. The reading: this is the line that turns a great-looking topline into a real one. Which is why the number I actually cared about was never gross revenue; it was what came after the deductions, which brings us to the P&L point below.

Contribution margin and repeat/subscription rate. These are standard asks with no single authoritative benchmark, so I will not invent one — contribution margin is what is left after variable costs including trade spend, and repeat or subscription rate is your evidence that demand is real rather than promotion-bought. The reading: a strong repeat rate is the antidote to the CAC problem that hollowed out DTC, and contribution margin is where velocity, gross margin, and trade spend all land. Show them if you have them; do not fabricate a benchmark to make them look normal.

The through-line across all six: a consumer investor reconstructs your revenue from velocity times distribution, checked against the deductions. That is a different reconstruction than a software investor's cohort table, and it is why the scan data and the deduction-adjusted P&L below are the two most load-bearing artifacts in the room.

What goes in each folder?

Eight folders, and the ones that decide a consumer deal are 02 through 05 — the deduction-adjusted financials, the distribution contracts and scan data, the supply-chain agreements, and the brand and formula ownership. Here is the folder-by-folder build.

01. Corporate & Cap Table. Certificate of incorporation, bylaws, the cap table, and any prior financing documents (SAFEs, notes, prior-round docs). Table stakes at any stage; a term sheet gets conditioned on it.

02. Financials. Monthly P&L, burn, and runway — and the artifact that matters most in a CPG room, a deduction-adjusted P&L that shows net revenue after trade spend, slotting, and distributor chargebacks. This is not optional polish. Gross-to-net deductions in promo-heavy categories commonly run 30-40% of gross, meaning net is 60-70% of gross (CPG Scout; Eightx). An investor who sees only your gross topline assumes the worst about the deductions; an investor who sees the bridge from gross to net trusts the whole statement. Show the walk.

03. Sales & Distribution. The center of gravity. Distributor agreements with UNFI and KeHE (including minimum-purchase obligations and change-of-control language), retailer purchase orders, and scan-data exports from Circana, SPINS, or NielsenIQ. Include the deductions detail here too: UNFI and KeHE chargeback and deduction disputes run on short clocks — about 30-60 days at UNFI and 90 days at KeHE, with a six-month hard deadline (Glimpse). A founder who has already reconciled these and can show the dispute history reads as operationally in control.

04. Supply Chain. Co-packer (co-manufacturer) and broker agreements, with capacity commitments and, critically, change-of-control terms. This is where consumer deals most often break: an unassignable co-packer agreement or a single co-manufacturer with no qualified backup is a real risk an investor prices in. Put the agreements in and be honest about concentration.

05. Brand & IP. Trademark registrations in your primary markets, and a clear answer to a question consumer investors always ask: do you own the formula, or does your contract manufacturer? Owned formula is an asset; contract-manufacturer-owned formula is a dependency. Document which one you are.

06. Compliance. FDA and label compliance files as relevant to your category — FDA food or dietary-supplement labeling, or FDA cosmetics registration and labeling (the MoCRA regime) for beauty, and for alcoholic beverages a federal COLA (Certificate of Label Approval). Only include what genuinely applies to your products; do not manufacture a regulatory shelf you do not need.

07. Team & References. Bios and pre-cleared reference contacts. Consumer checks, like all early checks, close on conviction about people — staging the references before they are asked for removes a week of late-diligence delay.

08. Deck & Memo. The pitch deck (your first-touch artifact) and a short, forwardable one-page memo. This is the top of the funnel; it goes to everyone, and it is never NDA-gated.

If you want the generic version of folders 01, 07, and 08 across any investor room, the data room for investors guide covers it; this post's contribution is folders 02 through 06, which are the CPG-specific spine.

What does a minimum viable version look like for an angel round?

At friends-and-family and angel scale, a shared Google Drive folder is genuinely enough — the deck, a simple model, a one-page cap table, whatever early sell-through you have, and any signed co-packer or distributor agreement — and building more than that this early is a negative signal, not a positive one. I want to be straight about this because the whole point of an honest guide is to tell you when you do not need the thing I sell.

If you are raising a $250K angel round on the strength of a promising early test, you do not need eight folders and you do not need a paid data room. You need five things a first-time investor can read in an afternoon: the deck, a simple financial model, a one-page cap table, your early sell-through or scan data (whatever exists, labeled as first-party if that is what it is), and any executed co-packer or distributor agreement you already have. A Drive folder holds all of that. Sending an angel a sixty-folder M&A-style room signals a founder who copied a diligence checklist off the internet instead of one who knows their business cold — the same over-building tell that sinks tech seed rooms.

The line where this changes is specific and worth naming: the room earns its keep when real contracts and scan data enter and multiple institutional investors are reading at once. That is when you need view-only access on the P&L, an NDA gate on the executed contracts, and a separate link per investor so you can see who is serious. Before then, do not gold-plate. The minimum viable version is minimum on purpose.

How do you stage disclosure across 40 investor conversations?

Three tiers: the deck and teaser go to everyone, the financials and scan data open after a real call, and the full room with executed contracts opens after a term sheet or clear intent — and the NDA sits on the contracts, never on the deck. A consumer raise means a lot of conversations, and the room is what lets you run them in parallel without either over-exposing your contracts or slowing yourself down with premature gates.

Here is the staging.

• Tier 1 — everyone. The deck and a one-page memo. These are top-of-funnel artifacts, and the venture norm is unambiguous: VCs do not sign NDAs to review a pitch deck, and gating it reads as naive (DocSend's research, which our seed round data room guide covers in depth). Send it freely and track who reads it.
• Tier 2 — after a real meeting. The financials, the deduction-adjusted P&L, and the scan-data summary. Once an investor has signaled genuine interest, they get the numbers to go deep on. A Simple NDA is reasonable at this tier and nobody blinks at it.
• Tier 3 — after a term sheet or clear intent. The full room, including executed distributor and co-packer agreements. This is where a CPG room diverges from a pure tech room, and the divergence is the whole reason to have a real gate.

That divergence deserves its own sentence, because it resolves the NDA confusion that comes from applying tech advice to a consumer raise. The venture reality is that investors will not sign an NDA to look at your deck — but your distributor and co-manufacturer agreements contain counterparty pricing, minimum-purchase terms, and change-of-control language that genuinely justify a gate. So you NDA-gate the contracts, not the deck. The deck and the scan summary stay open; the executed agreements sit behind a Simple or Advanced NDA that an investor signs only once they are at the deep tier. That is the honest reconciliation of "VCs don't sign NDAs" with "these specific documents actually warrant one."

The operational piece that makes all three tiers work is per-investor control: give each fund its own link, so you can see which investor actually read the financials versus which one opened the room and skimmed, and so you can revoke any single investor's access without disturbing the others. Running 40 conversations through one shared link gives you no signal and no control; running them through per-viewer links turns the room into a real-time read on who is in your round.

How is a CPG data room different from a SaaS data room?

A CPG room is inventory-and-distribution-shaped; a SaaS room is code-and-cohort-shaped — and the difference is not cosmetic, it is which documents carry the argument. This is the single most useful mental model for a consumer founder who has been reading generic startup fundraising advice, because almost all of that advice is written for software.

A software seed room is built around a customer cube and a retention curve — the load-bearing evidence is a cohort table that lets an investor reconstruct recurring revenue and see whether it retains. That template is deliberately minimalist: five operator-grade files, not sixty folders, and our seed round data room post owns that framework in full. That post is software-startup-shaped; a CPG room is inventory-and-distribution-shaped — so if you are a tech founder, read that one instead of this one, and if you are a consumer founder, read that one only to borrow the discipline (every number ties, projections labeled as projections) and not the document set.

Because the document set really is different. A CPG room's load-bearing evidence is scan data, retailer POs, distributor and co-packer agreements, trade-spend reconciliation, and formula ownership. A software investor reconstructs revenue from a cohort table; a consumer investor reconstructs it from velocity times distribution, then checks it against the deductions. The risks are different too: a SaaS investor is underwriting churn and CAC payback, while a consumer investor is underwriting supply concentration, shelf durability, and margin after trade spend. Same underlying rigor, entirely different room — because a consumer business breaks in different places than a software business, and the room has to prove you have covered the places yours can break.

What tools do CPG founders actually use for this?

A spreadsheet and a Google Drive folder at friends-and-family scale, then a real data room once contracts and scan data enter — and the honest split is that Drive is genuinely enough until the moment it isn't. Let me give you the segmented answer rather than a pitch, because the segmentation is the truth.

At angel and friends-and-family scale, a shared Drive folder is fine and free. You are sending a handful of documents to people who already know you. There is no NDA to manage, no contract pricing to protect, and no need for per-viewer analytics. Use Drive, and spend your energy on the deck and the model instead of the tooling.

The picture changes when real contracts and scan data enter and institutional investors show up. Now you have executed distributor and co-packer agreements with counterparty terms you should not broadcast, a deduction-adjusted P&L you want to serve view-only, and 40 conversations you want to run in parallel with real signal on who is engaged. A consumer fundraise at that stage is document-heavy — thousands of files across scan exports, agreements, and POs — and what you need from a tool is storage and control: somewhere to upload it all, organize it once, gate the sensitive contracts, and reuse the room across every investor and later across acquirers. That is a document-hub job, not a link-analytics-dashboard job.

That is the job I built Peony for, and here is the honest fit across our tiers, serving 6,800+ customers:

• Free — $0. Up to 50 documents, page-by-page analytics, unlimited viewers, and link expiry. Genuinely enough for an angel round. It does not expire.
• Business — $30/admin/month (billed annually; $44 monthly). Up to 1,000 documents, Simple NDA, screenshot protection, AI document Q&A, unlimited e-signatures. The fit for a lighter raise where a Simple NDA on the contracts is all you need.
• Data Room — $52/admin/month (billed annually; $75 monthly). Unlimited documents, storage, and rooms, plus Advanced NDA with countersigning and per-viewer dynamic watermarking. This is the natural tier for a document-heavy CPG raise — I will say that plainly rather than steer you up-market for its own sake — because unlimited storage matches the document volume, the Advanced NDA gives the executed contracts a real countersigned gate, and per-viewer watermarks put each investor's identity across the financials you serve view-only.

Analytics and link expiry are on every tier, including Free, one-click revoke is on Business and up, viewers are always free, and rooms are unlimited on the Data Room plan — so opening the room to twenty investors costs exactly what opening it to one does. And the concede stands: for a friends-and-family check, a free Drive folder is genuinely enough, and I would rather you use it than pay for something you do not need yet. The room is for when the contracts and the scan data arrive.

One closing thought that matters for how you build this. The same hub you build to raise this round is the one you reuse when the acquirers come. A consumer brand that organizes its scan data, distributor agreements, co-packer contracts, and trademark portfolio once, into a room it controls, has already done most of the work an exit demands — whether that is selling a beauty brand or selling a food and beverage brand. Build the hub for the raise; keep it for the sale.

Frequently asked questions

What do consumer investors expect in a CPG fundraising data room in 2026?

A tight, organized document hub built around eight things: corporate and cap table, financials with a deduction-adjusted P&L, sales and distribution (distributor agreements, retailer POs, and scan exports from Circana, SPINS, or NielsenIQ), supply chain (co-packer and broker agreements), brand and IP (trademark registrations and who owns the formula), compliance (FDA or MoCRA where it applies), team, and the deck plus a short memo. The thing that distinguishes a CPG room from a tech room is that the contracts and the scan data carry the case, not a cohort chart. In the 2026 environment — where US e-commerce and consumer-products VC fell roughly 97% from a 2021 peak above $5B to roughly $130M in 2023 (Crunchbase News), and the median consumer seed round dropped below $1M in Q1 2025 (Carta) — investors are selective and metrics-forward, so the room's job is to make a defensible number easy to verify.

Which CPG metrics decide whether you get the meeting, and how do investors read them?

Six carry most of the weight, and each has a reading an investor applies before they take the number at face value. Velocity — units or dollars per store per week, which syndicated providers report as dollars per $MM ACV to normalize for store size (CPG Scout; NielsenIQ) — is read as a trend, not a level: rising velocity clears the bar, a flat one does not, and a high number in a handful of premium doors is not the same as the same number across a national footprint. ACV % is the share of all-commodity retail dollar-volume in stores that carry you — distribution quality weighted by store size — and a big ACV with weak velocity reads as distribution you cannot hold. Gross margin is checked against category norms — food roughly 25-35%, beverage 40-55%, beauty 60-80%, with published acquisition criteria (Taylor Sicard) looking for gross margins above 40% (the category bands are illustrative). Trade spend runs about 15-25% of gross sales for established brands and often above 25% for emerging ones, quoted on gross, not net (CPG Scout). Contribution margin and repeat or subscription rate round it out — standard asks with no single authoritative benchmark. The read that matters most: ACV without velocity is vanity, because shelf you cannot sell through comes back off.

What goes in each folder of a CPG data room?

Eight folders. Corporate and cap table: incorporation, cap table, prior financing docs. Financials: monthly P&L and, critically, a deduction-adjusted P&L that shows net after trade spend, slotting, and distributor chargebacks — because gross-to-net deductions in promo-heavy categories commonly run 30-40% of gross (CPG Scout; Eightx). Sales and distribution: distributor agreements (UNFI, KeHE) with minimum-purchase and change-of-control terms, retailer POs, and scan-data exports from Circana, SPINS, or NielsenIQ. Supply chain: co-packer and broker agreements with capacity commitments. Brand and IP: trademark registrations and clear documentation of whether you own the formula or your contract manufacturer does. Compliance: FDA food or dietary-supplement labeling, FDA cosmetics registration and labeling (MoCRA) for beauty, or a federal COLA for alcoholic beverages — whatever applies to your category. Team: bios and references. And the deck plus a one-page memo. The distributor-deduction line is its own diligence item — UNFI and KeHE deduction disputes run on short clocks — about 30-60 days at UNFI and 90 days at KeHE with a six-month hard deadline (Glimpse).

What does a minimum viable CPG data room look like for an angel round?

Small and honest. At friends-and-family and angel scale a shared Google Drive folder is genuinely enough: the deck, a simple financial model, a one-page cap table, whatever early sell-through or scan data you have, and any co-packer or distributor agreement already signed. You do not need eight folders or a paid tool to raise a $250K angel round, and building a sixty-folder M&A-style room at this stage signals a founder copying a checklist rather than one who knows the business. The moment that changes is when real contracts and scan data enter and multiple institutional investors are reading at once — that is when view-only access, an NDA gate on the contracts, and per-viewer control start to earn their keep. Do not gold-plate before then.

How do you stage disclosure across 40 investor conversations?

Three tiers. The teaser and deck go to everyone — VCs do not sign NDAs to look at a deck, and gating it reads as naive (DocSend, via our seed guide). After a real call, open the financials and scan data. After a term sheet or clear intent, open the full room including the executed distributor and co-packer agreements. The NDA reality in venture is specific: investors will not sign to review your deck, but your distributor and co-manufacturer contracts contain counterparty terms and pricing that genuinely justify a gate, so you NDA-gate the contracts, not the deck. Give each investor a separate link so you can see who actually read the financials versus who skimmed, and shut any one of them out without touching the others.

How is a CPG data room different from a SaaS or seed tech data room?

A tech seed room is code-and-cohort-shaped: the load-bearing evidence is a customer cube, a retention curve, and a five-file minimalist set, and our seed round data room post owns that template. A CPG room is inventory-and-distribution-shaped: the load-bearing evidence is scan data, retailer POs, distributor and co-packer agreements, trade-spend reconciliation, and formula ownership. A software investor reconstructs revenue from a cohort table; a consumer investor reconstructs it from velocity times distribution and then checks it against the deductions. Same discipline — every number ties, projections labeled as projections — but a different document set, because the risks are supply, shelf, and margin rather than churn and CAC payback.

What does a CPG brand actually need from a data room tool — and what does it cost?

For a fundraise, a consumer brand needs storage and control more than link-analytics dashboards: somewhere to upload thousands of documents — scan exports, co-packer agreements, distributor paperwork, POs — organize them once, NDA-gate the contracts, and reuse the same room across 40 investor conversations and later across acquirers. I run Peony, a data room company serving 6,800+ customers, and this is the job it is built for. The natural tier for this cohort is the Data Room plan at $52/admin/month (billed annually; $75 monthly): unlimited documents, storage, and rooms, plus Advanced NDA with countersigning and per-viewer dynamic watermarking — which matters because a CPG raise is document-heavy and the contracts need a real gate. The $30/admin/month Business plan (Simple NDA, up to 1,000 documents) covers a lighter raise, and the free tier ($0, up to 50 documents) is genuinely enough for an angel round. Analytics and link expiry are on every tier, one-click revoke is on Business and up, viewers are always free, and rooms are unlimited on the Data Room plan, so opening a room to twenty investors costs the same as opening it to one.

Do you need to show scan data (Circana, SPINS, NielsenIQ) to raise a CPG round?

If you are in retail, yes — increasingly it is the number the investor trusts most. Syndicated scan and panel data from Circana (formed from the IRI and NPD merger), SPINS (the natural and specialty channel), and NielsenIQ are the sources investors use to sanity-check the velocity and ACV you claim, because they are third-party and hard to massage (NielsenIQ). A founder-built velocity number with no syndicated backing gets discounted. If you are DTC-only and pre-retail, you will not have scan data yet — show your own sell-through and be explicit that it is first-party. Put whatever you have in the sales-and-distribution folder and label the source.

Should a CPG founder gate the data room behind an NDA?

Gate the contracts, not the deck. The venture norm is unambiguous: investors do not sign NDAs to review a pitch deck, and asking them to reads as inexperience. But a CPG room is different from a pure tech room in one way that matters — it contains executed distributor and co-manufacturer agreements with real counterparty pricing and change-of-control terms, and those genuinely warrant a Simple or Advanced NDA once an investor reaches the deep tier. So the rule is the same as the seed rule with one CPG-specific addition: never NDA-gate the deck or the scan-data summary, do gate the executed contracts, and only after a real meeting.

Related resources

• Seed Round Data Room — the software-startup five-file template (customer cube, memo, deck, model, pipeline); read it if you are code-and-cohort-shaped rather than inventory-and-distribution-shaped.
• Top Consumer Investors in 2026 — whom to actually pitch: the 15 consumer VCs still writing checks, with fund sizes and what each looks for.
• Data Room for Investors — the generic investor-facing room and provider comparison underneath the CPG-specific folders here.
• 12 Consumer Capital Partners for Independent Sponsors — the buy-side companion: who funds consumer roll-ups and what they need in the room.
• How to Sell a Beauty Brand — the exit side, where the same hub serves acquirers instead of investors.
• How to Sell a Food and Beverage Brand — the F&B exit, and the moat items (co-packer, distribution, formula) an acquirer diligences.
• Peony for Fundraising — the data-room workflow set up around a raise.