7 Tactics for Connecting Investors with Opportunities

Finance event stakeholders are in the business of making, managing, and growing capital. At the same time, fintech startups, financial service providers, and emerging innovators are actively seeking funding to help scale their companies. Your event can be the bridge that connects these two groups by creating an environment where investments happen, partnerships form, and market growth accelerates. 

Here are 7 ways to make sure your event is a premier destination for investment opportunities.

1. Innovation Showcases

Whether it’s AI-driven trading platforms or blockchain-based payment systems, investors are constantly looking for disruptive technologies. An innovation showcase is a space where fintech startups and financial innovators can present cutting-edge solutions. 

By creating a dedicated space that investors can peruse, your event can help to consolidate what might otherwise require months of research for them. Delivering a highly curated experience also reinforces your industry expertise and your ability to not only identify finance visionaries, but motivate them to show up for you. 

Start by designating a showcase area where pre-vetted startups can demonstrate their technologies. Ensure presentations are structured with clear business cases, market potential, and scalability factors. While it’s important that those seeking investment can showcase their creativity, it’s useful to have some standard criteria or formula so it’s easy for investors to compare solutions. Then, to streamline networking, provide investors with a guide highlighting participating startups and their investment needs.

2. Startup Competitions

Many startups struggle to gain investor attention, while investors seek early access to promising ventures before they scale. For both stakeholders, getting a sense of how different solutions measure up to each other can often involve a large market research investment. Even when you have the resources and know-how to conduct that research, it often lacks nuance around the personalities behind them.

A live competition adds excitement to your event while giving investors exclusive insights into fresh ideas and emerging trends. To incentivize participation, offer winners tangible outcomes like funding, mentorship, or strategic partnerships.

Invite early-stage fintech and financial service startups to pitch in front of a panel of investors. The metrics for determining the winner should be clear, fair, and consistent, and could focus on criteria like market viability, scalability, and innovation. Consider different categories that start-ups can win, like “best new concept” or “best marketing plan.”

To ensure that all participants value the experience regardless of the outcome, facilitate post-competition networking to connect investors with startups that caught their interest.

3. Live Demos

Investors inevitably need to move beyond theoretical pitches and experience a solution’s actual functionality before making a funding decision. Hands-on presentations give them a real-world understanding of a solution’s usability and challenges. Live demos also give startups an opportunity to showcase their product’s usability, security, and scalability.

These demos could be one-on-one, in which case you might benefit from a hosted buyer format, or one-to-many, using dedicated demo sessions. You might even consider something in between, in which investors interested in a particular type of product might form a Dragon’s Den-like panel that start-ups can pitch to. 

Encourage interactive Q&A so investors can ask about technical capabilities, integrations, and scalability, and consider capturing these sessions on video for post-event distribution to a wider investor audience on demand.

4. Targeted Investor-Startup Connections

Standard event networking can often lead to missed opportunities if investors and startups have to spend a lot of time on basic qualifying criteria.

Stova’s AI-powered networking recommendations combine data submitted during registration with weighted criteria it derives from attendee interactions across its thousands of events to connect event stakeholders with the highest-potential contacts at the event.

These recommendations can be delivered through the mobile event app or virtual event platform so investors can book meetings with startups based on shared interests, funding stages, or investment goals (and vice versa). 

5. Investor-Only Networking Lounges

Investors can benefit from exclusive spaces where they can engage in focused discussions, evaluate opportunities, and examine emerging trends in finance and fintech. Spaces like these are critical for cultivating and nurturing high-value communities as they draw those with real decision-making power and compelling capital.

Reinforce the sense of exclusivity by designing a high-end lounge with limited access for verified investors where you host exclusive content, like roundtable discussions that give them a rare peek into industry trends and allow them to exchange insights. 

You might also consider concierge services to facilitate introductions and deal discussions during the event itself, and a robust online platform where they can network within this closed community afterwards.

6. Industry-Specific Investment Panels

Startups often lack clarity on what investors are looking for, and investors want to hear from their peers about where capital is heading. Expert-led discussions provide startups with actionable insights on how to position their ventures, while investors benefit from a broader understanding of market trends, regulatory impacts, and high-growth sectors.

Organize panel discussions featuring leading investors and fintech executives with a focus on key topics such as regulatory shifts, investment hotbeds, and risk assessment. The panel should ideally reflect a number of different sectors so panelists can comment on how different areas of finance interact with each other and impact larger trends. 

Allowing startup attendees to ask direct questions is an essential part of these types of sessions. Using Stova’s mobile event app, attendees can submit questions through the app, which can be vetted by a moderator, or made visible to the rest of the attendees so they can upvote the questions of most importance to them.

7. Deal-Making Digital Platforms

Networking shouldn’t stop once the event ends, but without a structured way to follow-up and maintain contact, many connections fail to materialize into deals.

An event technology platform that enables stakeholders to access investor profiles, create contact lists, schedule meetings, and track follow-ups after the event is critical. Not only does it enhance networking during the event, it allows investors and startups to maintain contact and continue to nurture their connections.

Enabling follow-ups through chat functions, virtual meetings, and document sharing can support the stickiness of your event and the event technology supporting it. These features mean that event stakeholders don’t need to switch to another platform to keep the conversation going. However, the companies seeking investment may also be exhibiting at your event, and timely follow-ups are essential. Stova’s lead generation solution allows exhibitors to quickly collect data and qualify leads directly on the show floor, and feed them to an exhibitor’s preferred CRM for immediate follow-up.

Conclusion

Making your finance event a hub for investment opportunities requires more than just assembling investors and startups in the same room. By implementing structured tactics such as innovation showcases, live demos, targeted matchmaking, and exclusive investor spaces, you can create an ecosystem that attracts investors and helps emerging companies gain visibility.

If you’d like to learn more about how Stova can help your stakeholders learn about and seize opportunities, book a demo now.