The Self-Assessment Workbook

Score yourself against the criteria, see which level you have reached, and get the list of what is still open.

The rubric tells you what funders assess. The workbook lets you find out where you stand against it. It carries all 116 criteria across the five levels, both dimensions and both tiers, with the pitch and diligence standards attached to each one, so a team can work through it without referring back to these pages.

It takes an afternoon the first time and about an hour to update thereafter. Nothing is sent anywhere. It is a spreadsheet on your own machine.

What is in it

Four tabs. Instructions holds two settings and the scoring scale. Project and Team hold the criteria, one row each. Summary computes everything and needs no input.

How it works
Three steps. Only the first two need any input from you.
1
Set your context

Two cells on the Instructions tab: solution type, MedTech or Digital Medicine, and funder logic, Financial or Mission. These drive which criteria apply to you and at what tier. A criterion that is Must Have for MedTech and Should Have for Digital Medicine changes tier automatically. A criterion that only Financial funders assess drops out of your denominator entirely. Do not override the calculated columns; change these two cells instead.

2
Score the Project and Team tabs

Work down each row where Applies reads Yes, scoring against the pitch standard shown beside it. Four values: Not started, Started, Mostly met, Met. Where a row is already Met, record whether the diligence evidence is In place. That column is locked until Status reads Met, because evidence behind a claim you cannot yet make is not a gap.

3
Read the Summary

Two tables and a chart, all calculated. Pitch Readiness shows what you can claim at each level. Diligence Readiness shows how much of the same requirement is evidenced. Nothing on this tab is typed.

What the Summary tells you

Readiness profile: two tables, one for pitch readiness and one for diligence readiness, each showing Must Have and Should Have completion for Project and Team across the five funding levels, with a verdict for each level.
Pitch readiness above, diligence readiness below. Both tables use the same criteria and the same denominator.

Each row is a funding level. Project and Team are scored separately and never averaged, because a weakness in either is a different kind of risk. The verdict column names the state and counts what is outstanding, so a team knows not only that a level is short but by how much and on which dimension.

The example above reads: Translational reached and competitive; Pre-seed blocked by one Project and one Team gap; Seed blocked by five and four. That is a team that should be preparing a Pre-seed raise, not a Seed one.

The two tables are not the same question

Pitch Readiness asks what you can claim in a first meeting. Diligence Readiness asks how much of that claim is evidenced well enough to survive a data room. Both use the same denominator, so diligence can never exceed pitch, and the distance between the two rows is the evidencing work outstanding. Diligence never blocks a level. It predicts how hard the close will be.

The chart

Horizontal bar chart with two bars per funding level, project in blue and team in teal, each showing pitch completion as a pale bar with diligence completion drawn inside it as a darker bar.
Two bars per level. The pale bar is what you can claim, the dark bar inside it is what you can evidence.

The gap between the pale and dark bars at any level is work nobody schedules, because it produces no new capability and no new result. It only makes existing results legible to someone who was not in the room. The chart makes that gap visible, and it makes the drop-off point obvious: the level where the bars stop is where the preparation stops.

Why the criteria repeat at every level

Evidence loop at each funding level: does the technology work, does the business work, can you evidence it, then raise and repeat at the next level.
The same three questions at every level, at a rising standard.

The workbook holds every level, not just the one you are targeting, because the questions do not change between levels; the bar does. A team convincing at Seed can fail at Seed+ on a criterion it considered settled. Scoring all five shows where that happens before a funder finds it.

Reading the tabs

Columns you fill in
Four, and only four

Status against the pitch standard. Diligence Evidence, once Status is Met. Evidence location, where the artifact actually lives. Notes, what is missing and who owns it.

Everything else is calculated: Tier, Applies, both scores, and the whole Summary tab.

Row shading
Three states

Green means Status is Met. Grey means the criterion does not apply to your solution type or funder logic, so it is excluded from the denominator. Salmon means a data error: diligence evidence recorded on a row whose Status is not Met, which is not counted.

Everything outstanding is left plain. Most of the sheet will be plain for most of a team's life, and that is the point.

One thing worth knowing

Blank and Not started both score zero. The difference is that Not started means you looked and found nothing to show, and blank means you have not looked yet. Both are honest answers. Neither is penalised more than the other, so there is no reason to inflate a score you cannot support in a meeting.

Scope

The workbook covers MedTech, which includes IVDs, and Digital Medicine. BioPharma is not covered. Its funding ladder anchors on different milestones and several criteria do not apply, so it needs its own version rather than a solution-type toggle.

Criteria v1.0. The workbook is a template. Save your own copy and update it before each raise rather than scoring once and filing it.

Overview › Translational › Pre-seed › Seed › Seed+ › Series A › Raise Size › Self-Assessment