Readiness
Raising? You will be checked either way.
Institutional money runs diligence you do not see: cap table, unlocks, custody, governance, the quality of your paper. The desk runs it first, while there is still time to fix what it finds.
A readiness audit is advisory work. It is not an assessment under the Standard, and it cannot become one — see the line below.
The audit
Send the data room. Seventy-two hours later you know where you stand.
What holds, what fails, and what an allocator’s diligence will flag — read against the published Standard, which is the document any future assessment would be issued under. The first audit is free. It convinces, or it does not.
- Cap table and unlocks
- Who holds what, vesting shape, and the schedule an allocator will model against you.
- Custody and control
- Who can move what, under which conditions, on which rails.
- Governance
- Key-person concentration, oversight, and what happens when someone leaves.
- Documentation quality
- Whether your paper survives being read by someone paid to doubt it.
The sprint
Then, if you want the gaps closed.
A scoped engagement to close what the audit found. You leave with a data room that survives contact with an investment committee.
- 01 Audit Seventy-two hours on the data room. You get the gap list, ranked by what an allocator will flag first.
- 02 Fix Scoped work on tokenomics, documentation, governance and custody posture.
- 03 Re-read The desk reads the room again, against the same published Standard. Still advisory — no mark, no serial.
- 04 Raise You go out with the gaps closed, or knowing exactly which ones are not.
The line
One thing the desk will never sell you: its own verdict.
A project the desk has advised cannot be assessed for six months. After that it can only be assessed with an independent reviewer on the file — someone who did no part of the advisory work, and who signs alongside the analyst. There is no staffing exception. The advisory working papers are quarantined from the assessment file.
Published policy, not case-by-case judgment. That separation is the whole reason passing the Standard would be worth anything. You are not buying a stamp — you are getting ready to earn one, from anyone.
Two lines and a deck, and you will get a straight answer about whether the desk can help.