Key takeaways
- Funds collect applications through a website form, a general form tool, email, or a dedicated portal.
- A portal should let founders save and resume, give them a receipt, and keep the deck as the original file.
- Delsivo's portal carries your logo, colours and copy on your subdomain in the pilot, and on your own domain in the first release.
- Each application becomes one deal: a retried submit never creates a duplicate, and suspected duplicates go to an analyst to confirm.
How funds collect startup applications today
The most common setup is a form on the fund's website, built in Google Forms, Typeform or similar, with a field for the deck. Responses land in a sheet and the deck lands in a drive folder or as a link. Some funds still ask for a deck by email. Accelerators often use a dedicated application platform for each cohort.
Each of these works. Where they strain is after the submit: the founder gets no clear receipt, the team can't ask for more without starting an email thread, and the same company applies twice under slightly different names.
What a startup application portal should do
- Let founders save and come back, because a good application takes more than one sitting.
- Give a receipt and a private link, so founders know it arrived and can return to it.
- Keep the deck as the original file, and treat a new deck as a new version.
- Ask only what you will use, with your own questions beside the basics.
- Carry your fund's name, so founders know who they are dealing with.
- Feed straight into review, without anyone copying data across.
A VC application form template covers the questions; the rest is what the portal does around them.
How Delsivo's startup application portal works
Every fund gets a portal on a subdomain such as yourfund.delsivo.app in the pilot. On the upgrade plan, in the first release, you can use your own domain, such as apply.yourfund.com, after a DNS ownership check, with the certificate issued automatically. Your logo, colours (contrast-checked on save), fonts from an allow-list, copy and legal links appear on the landing page, the application form and the founder workspace.
Founders apply through a public link, a private referral link, or a record an analyst creates for them. They sign in with a one-time code sent to their email, so no password or Google Account is needed. A retried submit creates one deal and one receipt. When an application looks like an earlier one, by company domain or founder identity, Delsivo suggests the match and an analyst confirms any merge.
More on white-label portals, including what is not offered: custom CSS or JavaScript, which could read founder documents.
What founders see, and what they don't
Founders see their own application, the key facts extracted from their deck, any requests the fund sends, and the files they are allowed to see. They can correct an extracted fact; the original stays and both are visible to the fund. They never see internal ratings, notes or the thesis check. Founders never pay.
Your fund decides whether its portal landing page is indexed by search engines. Applications and founder pages are never indexed, and an unpublished portal can't receive applications. The founders page explains the founder's side in full.
For accelerators and programmes
An accelerator's intake has a deadline and a cohort. A portal for it needs to take a burst of applications, let reviewers see only their share, and apply the same criteria to every applicant. Delsivo's rubric works the same way for a cohort as for a fund's rolling inbound, and live AI interviews for shortlisted applicants, with a text alternative, arrive in the first release. See accelerators.