Common questions about how Founder Review works, what the evaluations cover, how credits work, and what the reports do and don't tell you.
Founder Review is an AI-powered evaluation tool for pre-seed startup founders. It has two products: Evaluate Ideas, which runs a 12-agent AI investment committee against a startup idea and delivers a scored report; and Analysis Agents, which are configurable specialist agents for product, research, and strategy analysis.
It's for founders who want structured, investor-style feedback on their ideas before committing time or capital, or before going into investor conversations.
Pre-seed founders preparing for investor conversations. Specifically: founders who have an idea and want to pressure-test it before building, founders who are about to pitch and want to know where the weak points are, and founders choosing between two ideas who want a structured comparison.
It's not designed for later-stage due diligence, post-product-market-fit growth questions, or team management decisions.
The 12-agent committee covers: market analysis, customer validation, product and differentiation assessment, competitive landscape, business model and financial model, growth strategy, moat and defensibility, regulatory and risk assessment, and investor readiness. A 13th agent synthesizes the committee into a final memo and scored verdict.
Each agent produces a score from 1-10 with reasoning, key findings, and what evidence would raise the score. The committee memo integrates all findings into a final narrative.
Validate (3 credits) — Full 12-agent committee review. Best for a complete picture of one idea.
Focus Eval (1 credit) — Single specialist agent on one dimension. Best for a quick targeted check on a specific risk area.
Investor Debate (4 credits) — Multiple investor-style lenses argue for and against the idea. Best for stress-testing the narrative before pitching.
Compare Two Ideas (6 credits) — Side-by-side evaluation of two startup ideas. Best when choosing between two different paths.
Use Validate when you want a complete evaluation — you're not sure where the weak points are, or you want a full-spectrum score before pitching. It runs all 12 agents in parallel and takes a few minutes.
Use Focus Eval when you already know which area you want to examine. If your market sizing feels weak, or you want to stress-test the competitive moat specifically, Focus Eval gives you a deep single-agent analysis at one credit instead of three.
Analysis Agents are configurable specialist agents designed for specific founder work beyond full-idea validation. Available agents include:
Agent reports are saved to your account and available as downloadable PDFs.
Founder Review uses a one-time credit system. There is no subscription.
Credits never expire. Mode costs: Validate = 3 credits, Focus Eval = 1, Investor Debate = 4, Compare Two Ideas = 6. Analysis Agents = 1-2 credits depending on the agent.
No. Credits never expire. You can buy a bundle and use it across multiple ideas, over multiple sessions, over as long as you need.
Yes. Validate, Focus Eval, Investor Debate, and Compare reports can all be shared via a private link. Shared reports are redacted by default — the recipient sees the scores, verdict, and analysis, but not your raw intake answers. You can opt into full share if you want to show the complete context.
Shared reports expire after 30 days by default. You can revoke access at any time from your account.
Your idea text and intake answers are used only to run the evaluation. They are not used to train models, shared with other founders, or stored beyond what's needed for the saved report. Founder Review tracks product analytics events — things like which mode you used and whether the run completed — but these events never include idea text, report content, share tokens, or payment identifiers.
No. A high score means the stated assumptions are coherent and the idea is well-positioned based on the information provided. It does not mean execution will go smoothly, the market will behave as expected, or investors will fund it.
Founder Review evaluates the quality of the idea and the assumptions behind it. It cannot evaluate your specific execution capability, relationships, timing luck, or the thousand other things that determine whether a company succeeds.
The evaluations are only as good as the information you provide. Sparse or vague answers produce generic analysis. Specific, detailed intake answers — naming the exact customer, explaining the pricing rationale, describing the moat mechanism — produce more precise, actionable feedback.
The agents are calibrated for pre-seed founders evaluating early-stage ideas. They will be skeptical where skepticism is warranted and give credit for genuine evidence. They are not designed for later-stage validation where financial models, customer retention data, and technical architecture reviews are the primary inputs.
Detailed guides on specific topics:
See a complete evaluation report before running your own.