At IFF, we want to invest in the greatest companies with an Italian DNA all over the world. That’s why we started our scouting program: to make sure we identify the best Italian founders through well-connected people in each startup ecosystem.
Today, we have IFF scouts in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, New York, Singapore, London, Berlin, Barcelona, Amsterdam, and more to come.
In this article Susanna, one of our amazing scouts based in Barcelona, shares a bit about what it means to be a VC scout and why she decided to be one for Italian Founders Fund. Over to you Susanna!
Venture Capital can often feel like a mysterious world.
It can seem like a closed private club, hard to access and governed by unwritten rules no one ever explains - both for founders trying to raise capital and for people trying to work in VC.
As a founder, getting in touch with VCs isn’t easy. Warm intros are the best way, while cold outreach is often ignored, and standing out early, before you get traction, is very hard!
Breaking into VC as a career isn’t much easier either - even though today it’s becoming more accessible through fellowships and training programs.
For a long time, I was also quite hesitant to reach out to VCs myself - when helping founders during my time in accelerator programs.
Last year, I started collaborating with a fund as a VC scout, and I wanted to write about it because it’s still one of the least talked-about mechanisms behind early-stage investing - yet one that can be very relevant for first time founders.
In this article, I want to explain what a VC scout actually does, why scout programs exist and why I decided to become one.
What is a VC scout?
A VC scout is essentially a venture firm’s early radar for talent.
VC funds often invest globally but operate with small teams and limited local presence. Scouts help bridge that gap by identifying promising founders before they even look “fundable” on paper.
Scouts are not partners and usually not decision-makers: their role is to spot early signals and share them with the fund. In some programs, scouts also deploy small checks directly on behalf of the fund.
In practice, a VC scout:
Spots startups before demo days or hype
Meets founders and understands what they’re building and their commitment
Builds trusted, informal relationships
Shares qualitative signal and makes warm intros to the VC team
From there, the fund takes over - the team leads the follow-up meeting, and if there’s a fit, they move into due diligence and eventually make the decision to invest.
The real value is timing: finding exceptional founders early creates leverage - for both founders and investors.
The first modern scout program was credited to Sequoia Capital - one of the world’s largest and most successful venture capital firms - which launched its Scout Program in 2009. Since then, scouting has become a core early-stage sourcing strategy, especially in the US.
Scout programs in Europe: where are we at?
The US pioneered the model, but Europe has been catching up quickly.
The first European scout program was launched in 2018 by Atomico. Since then, prestigious funds like Accel and Sequoia have all built structured scout schemes in Europe, and more keep launching. Sifted counted more than 25 active European scout programs by late 2021, and the number has continued to grow. [source]
The programs have a solid structure - just to give you an example, Atomico selects a cohort of 12–18 “angels” each year, each given $100k to invest, while Accel’s European Starters program gives each scout $200k to deploy, and now counts around 40 scouts across Europe - twice as many as when it launched.
Scout programs also contributed to developing the angel culture and community in Europe, benefiting the whole ecosystem. And being Europe a very fragmented market - with different hubs, languages, and ecosystems - a distributed scout model helps finding investment opportunities much better than a centralized investment team.
Who becomes a scout?
There’s no single profile, but great scouts usually share one thing: dense, high-trust networks.
Typical backgrounds include:
Startup founders or early employees
Operators active in startup communities
Community builders, accelerator operators, ecosystem connectors
The common denominator is proximity to talent and willingness to help!
Why do VC firms use scout programs?
Even strong VC brands can’t be everywhere.
Scout programs extend a fund’s reach into local ecosystems and help discover founders before they enter the traditional “VC circuit.” Scouts act as trusted, local extensions of the core team - close to the ground and highly contextual.
Why alignment with a fund’s thesis matters
Scouting is all about signal quality.
A scout needs to deeply understand the fund’s thesis, stage focus, and where it can actually add value.
I personally scout for Italian Founders Fund, a VC fund started by founders, for founders.
IFF backs companies from pre-seed to Series A with a strong Italian angle:
Italian companies
Italian founders abroad
International founders choosing Italy as a key market
What I value most is the founder-first mindset and the community behind it: IFF is a fund where the LPs are founders themselves. They’ve been there and this makes them exactly the kind of network a founder needs to access. This clear focus strongly aligns with what I care about and makes scouting meaningful to me.
Why I decided to become a VC scout
For me, scouting sits at the intersection of learning, leverage, and community.
I’ve spent six years working closely with founders across accelerators and any kind of training programs for startups. I’ve watched talented people struggling to get their first meeting just because they didn’t have the right intro or weren’t on anyone’s radar yet.
Two years ago, I co-founded Italian Tech Club - a community that connects Italians working in tech and startups abroad, to exchange best practices, learn from each other and create real opportunities.
My professional experience gave me an understanding of the challenges founders face in the earlier stages; while building ITC gave me a direct view of how much Italian talent abroad exists and how underconnected much of it still is.
When the opportunity of becoming a scout for IFF arrived, I didn’t think twice as it felt like a natural fit with what I had been doing so far - becoming a scout gave me the opportunity of putting my experiences and network together, and I keep seeing it as my way to actively contribute: helping founders and funds find each other earlier and more transparently.
Why am I writing this?
Recently, I was talking with a group of founders and one said to another:
“If I had to fundraise again today, instead of reaching out to dozens of VCs, I’d just ask founders who’ve already raised to introduce me - or find someone in my network connected to the fund.”
And he’s soooo right: VCs trust their founders and networks more than almost anything else.
The more founders understand how capital really flows, the healthier - and maybe more meritocratic? - the ecosystem becomes. And there’s still a lot to do when it comes to educating people on how VCs and startups actually work, but this is my contribution! :)
Want to learn more about VC scout programs? Here are some articles worth reading:
Thank you for reading and supporting,
Susanna & the IFF team
