Background
Sopris Capital is an early-stage venture capital firm investing primarily in tech-enabled services, software, and AI. Backed by a family office structure, they focus on companies with $1–5M in revenue that are growing quickly and seeking growth capital to scale.
Their edge? Proprietary deal flow. In a market where everyone sees the same opportunities, Sopris needed a way to find companies others weren’t seeing and get in front of founders before the competition.
That’s where Nick comes in. As Vice President of Business Development and the firm’s first BD hire, Nick was brought in to build Sopris’s proprietary sourcing engine from the ground up. His mandate: develop new channels for deal flow through direct outreach, intermediaries, and conferences. The challenge? Doing it efficiently enough to actually scale.
The Challenge
Before joining Sopris, Nick spent time at Serent Capital, where he learned firsthand how painful manual outreach could be. His previous workflow relied on three separate systems:
Prospecting tools (SourceScrub, Grata, PitchBook) to find companies
Sales automation tools (SalesLoft) to manage outreach sequences
ChatGPT to write personalized, thoughtful notes to founders
Three separate systems. Constant context-switching. Hours spent just getting a single outreach campaign off the ground. “I was cobbling together tools to do this. I was spending pretty much the same amount of money and wasting my time because I had to pull all these systems together manually.”
When Nick joined Sopris, the firm was relying on SourceScrub and their network to source deals. Outbound was limited because no one had the bandwidth to do it manually at scale. Nick knew there had to be a better way.
The Solution
Nick discovered Raylu right as he was starting at Sopris and immediately saw the opportunity. “Raylu takes what SourceScrub, Grata, and all the prospecting tools do, blends that with what SalesLoft does in sales automation, and then layers in ChatGPT-like functionality to write really thoughtful, tailored notes. It blends all three of those things together into one seamless product.”
Instead of juggling multiple platforms, Nick now runs his entire sourcing and outreach operation through Raylu:
Build market maps in minutes — drop in a thesis, and Raylu generates a comprehensive list of relevant companies, complete with the context needed to evaluate fit.
Automate personalized outreach at scale — Raylu’s AI writes tailored outreach emails in Nick’s voice, so every founder gets a thoughtful note, not a generic template.
Track and iterate — with everything in one system, Nick can see what’s working and refine his approach without jumping between tools.
The biggest thing is leverage. I get so much leverage on the system because it just makes outreach so much faster. I can spend my time doing research on companies, actually talking to companies, developing pieces of the markets that we’re most excited about.
— Nick, Vice President of Business Development, Sopris Capital
The Results
Reply rates on founder outreach
Prospecting, automation, and AI writing unified
BD function operating at the scale of a team
Immediate impact
“Once we got it all integrated and the workflow set up, it was pretty much immediate. I started getting a lot of conversations set up.” Reply rates now exceed 25% — versus the typical sub-10% most funds see in email outreach — and deal flow has increased dramatically enough that leadership has noticed. Nick’s time is freed up to actually talk to founders and develop theses instead of doing grunt work, with a one-person BD function operating with the leverage of a much larger team.
Why Nick refers Raylu to everyone he knows
Nick has become one of Raylu’s most active champions, consistently referring other funds to the platform. “If you’re doing any sort of direct outreach to companies and you’re not using Raylu or a tool like it, then you’re just wasting time.” When peers ask how he’s generating so much proprietary deal flow: “I’m not really waiting for more introductions from people. I’m not sitting there trying to craft my own tailored notes to everybody. I’m just able to do it in a much faster manner by leveraging the platform.” And perhaps the strongest endorsement of all: “If Raylu were to all of a sudden go under, it would definitely ruin my month.”
The quiet competitive advantage
Raylu doesn’t make outreach feel automated. It makes it feel personal, thoughtful, and tailored — because it is. The AI does the heavy lifting so investors can focus on what actually matters: building relationships with founders. “My passion is working with entrepreneurs, understanding their businesses, and understanding new markets. Raylu makes it so much easier to do that. It takes a lot of the grunt work off my plate so I can spend more time on those things.”
If you’re still sourcing the old way…
If your team is still stitching together prospecting tools, sales automation, and AI writing assistants, spending hours crafting individual outreach emails, getting reply rates below 10%, and burning BD bandwidth on grunt work instead of founder conversations — you’re running the old playbook. Firms like Sopris Capital are already on the new one. Raylu is how they got there.