Building the Series A Asset Register

Round Ready Academy — Lesson 5 of 11

This is the operational heart of the Round Ready Academy. Lessons 1 through 4 were about the shift to institutional capital and the framework your evidence has to speak. This lesson is about the document itself: what a Series A asset register looks like, how to build it, and what survives the first partner screen.

The register is not a pitch document and it is not a data room index. It is a structured, auditable summary of your intangible asset base organised by driver, with the evidence references a partner needs to cite in an IC memo. Institutional founders who arrive with one often close rounds with materially less friction.

★ Key Takeaway

The asset register is the document that answers "what did we actually buy?" — before the investor has to ask it. Every gap in the register is a question the partner has to guess at, and guesses in diligence are priced conservatively.

What a Series A Asset Register Is

A Series A asset register is a structured document, typically 20 to 40 pages, with one section per Opagio 12 driver. Each section contains:

A one-paragraph narrative of what you have built in that category
A short evidence table with specific quantitative support
A list of documents in the data room that back each claim
A honest statement of the gaps and what you are doing about them

It is not marketing. It is the document that allows the IC to price your round against a defensible evidence base rather than against the partner's interpretation of what you said.

The 47-Question Corpus — What Institutional Investors Actually Ask

Across the Series A rounds we have supported, institutional investors converge on roughly 47 distinct questions before they price a round. These cluster cleanly into the twelve Opagio 12 drivers. Not every round asks all 47 — but every round asks at least 35 of them.

The table below shows the cluster by driver. The register is built by answering each question with evidence, in the order the driver sits in the framework.

The 47-Question Diligence Corpus, Mapped to The Opagio 12

Driver	Typical diligence questions
1. Brand and Reputation	1. Unprompted recall in your target segment. 2. NPS and trend. 3. Branded search volume and trajectory. 4. Inbound versus outbound mix.
2. Customer Capital	5. Gross logo retention by cohort. 6. NRR by segment. 7. Top-10 concentration. 8. Contract length and auto-renew. 9. Cohort payback curves. 10. Expansion ARR trajectory.
3. Network Effects and Platforms	11. Evidence of value compounding with user base. 12. Cross-cohort retention comparison. 13. Two-sided exchange metrics.
4. Technology and Innovation	14. Architecture and scalability. 15. Build-versus-buy annotations. 16. Technical debt register. 17. Time-to-replicate estimate.
5. Data and Intelligence	18. Proprietary datasets and their coverage. 19. Data rights from customer contracts. 20. What your data enables that competitors cannot.
6. Human Capital	21. Key-person exposure. 22. Attrition rates by tenure band. 23. Senior hire pedigree. 24. Hiring plan for next 18 months.
7. Organisational Capital	25. Sales playbook documentation. 26. Onboarding plans by role. 27. Decision-rights document. 28. Operating cadence evidence.
8. Ecosystem and Partnerships	29. Material channel partners with revenue attribution. 30. Technology partner dependencies. 31. Industry body memberships.
9. Content and IP	32. Trademark schedule. 33. Patent schedule. 34. Trade secret register with access controls. 35. Data rights in customer and employee contracts.
10. Regulatory and Compliance	36. Permission list with status. 37. ISO 27001 / SOC 2 / GDPR position. 38. Time-to-obtain for any missing permissions.
11. Switching Costs and Lock-In	39. Average contract length. 40. Integration depth per tier. 41. Migration cost estimate. 42. Logo churn drivers when they have occurred.
12. Culture and Ways of Working	43. Glassdoor / eNPS scores. 44. Retention of first-ten hires. 45. Shipping cadence evidence. 46. Customer-contact norms. 47. Public commitments kept.

The register is your pre-built answer to each of these. When the diligence partner asks question 27, you point at section 7 of the register and the evidence document cited there.

How to Build the Register — Six Steps

The register looks like a lot of work when you read the 47-question table. In practice, most of the evidence already exists in your business; the exercise is surfacing and structuring it.

1. Run the diagnostic first

The Round Readiness Diagnostic is the fastest way to get the starting scaffold of the register. It produces a first-pass Opagio 12 profile that tells you where you have evidence and where you will need to produce new documents.

2. Extract the cohort data

Gross retention, net retention, and contribution margin per cohort and per segment, last eight quarters minimum. This single extraction covers questions 5 through 10 in the corpus above and typically takes a controller or finance lead two to three weeks.

3. Document what already exists

Sales playbook, onboarding plans, decision-rights document, operating cadence. Most of these exist in practice but not on paper. Writing them down takes days, not months, and moves the Organisational Capital section from weak to strong.

4. Build the IP schedule

Trademarks filed and granted, patent applications with status, trade secret register with access controls, IP ownership evidence from employment and contractor contracts. Your IP adviser will help; the register is their output filed in one document.

5. Score yourself honestly against the 47 questions

Strong / adequate / weak / missing, per question. The exercise takes an afternoon and produces a gap list that directs the next four weeks of work. Founders who skip this step tend to build registers that look complete but leave the most-asked questions thinly evidenced.

6. Close the top five gaps before the first partner meeting

Every gap closed before diligence is a question you do not have to answer under time pressure. Most founders find that four weeks of focused gap-closing moves the Opagio 12 profile materially.

What a Strong Register Looks Like, in Miniature

Here is a miniature example of one driver section from a strong Series A register. The full register has twelve such sections.

Example — Customer Capital section (abridged):

Narrative (one paragraph). We are a vertical SaaS for mid-market manufacturers, founded 2022. £2.1M ARR with 138 customers at the end of Q1 2026. Growth is land-and-expand, with an average first-contract ACV of £18,000 expanding to £41,000 by month 18 in the median cohort.

Evidence table. Gross logo retention (last 8 quarters, rolling): 89% / 91% / 92% / 93% / 93% / 94% / 94% / 94%. NRR (top-2 segments, Q1 2026): 128% / 134%. Top-10 concentration Q1 2026: 31%, down from 47% two years earlier. CAC payback, new-business cohort H2 2025: 15 months.

Data room references. DR-CC-01 (cohort file by segment, quarterly), DR-CC-02 (top-customer concentration trajectory), DR-CC-03 (contract-length distribution and auto-renew terms), DR-CC-04 (customer NPS by segment, quarterly).

Honest gap statement. One of the top-3 customers renewed late in Q4 2025 after a service incident in H2. The incident, the root cause, and the operational change are documented in DR-CC-05. Retention probability for this customer is now assessed at 70%. Forecasting assumes a 30% probability of non-renewal at the end of FY26.

The section is not long. It is specific, quantitative, and honest about the one material risk. That is the template for all twelve.

The Test for a Section Being "Done"

A section is done when a partner reading it alone — without you in the room, without having seen your deck — can write a paragraph of the IC memo from it. If they would have to call you to fill a gap, the section is not done.

What Changes When You Have the Register

Three things tend to change for founders who arrive at first partner meetings with a built-out register.

First, the partner meetings become faster and more targeted. The partner does not have to extract the evidence; they can test it against the narrative. That is a higher-trust conversation from the start.

Second, the diligence phase compresses. A built-out register answers most of the 47 questions on day one; the diligence phase becomes about verification rather than discovery. Rounds that would have taken five to seven weeks of diligence often close in three to four.

Third — and most materially — the round tends to price better. The register does not create value. It surfaces value that was already there, in a form the IC can price. The delta between a founder who surfaces their asset base well and one who does not is typically 15 to 30 percent of pre-money on otherwise identical businesses.

ℹ Note

A built-out register is not a one-off deliverable. Founders who maintain it through the round and into the post-close period get an additional benefit at Series B — the next register builds on the first, and the gap-narrowing across one round becomes the strongest evidence of operating discipline at the next.

How the Register Fits With the Rest of the Diligence Pack

The register is not the entire diligence pack. A full Series A data room typically contains five additional sections: financial (historic and forecast), legal (cap table, contracts, employment), commercial (customer references, pipeline, case studies), technical (architecture, security, scalability), and team (organisational, hiring plan, key-person analysis).

The register sits on top of these. It is the narrative-and-evidence layer that gives the investor a way to navigate the detail. Without the register, the partner has to build the narrative themselves from the data room. With it, the partner is verifying a narrative you have already framed — which is a structurally different and more favourable conversation.

The Tier Recommendation for Register-Building

Building the register from scratch in a document is possible. Most founders find it faster to use the Opagio platform, which structures the register by driver, applies sector benchmarks, and produces the diligence-ready exports investors actually want to read.

The right tier for a founder building a Series A register is Starter — it gives you unlimited assessments, all four valuation methods (Cost Approach, Market Approach, Income Approach, and Opagio Hybrid), full sector benchmarks, and capacity for up to ten companies.

★ Key Takeaway

Starter (£499) — unlimited assessments, all four valuation methods, full sector benchmarks, ten companies. For the full operating manual that this lesson is the educational counterpart to, open the Series A Playbook hub — and specifically the 47-question diligence corpus, which is the asset this lesson references throughout.

To continue the Round Ready course, the next lesson — Lesson 6: Designing the metrics tree investors expect — covers the metrics layer that sits above the asset register. For the broader context, see the Intangible Asset Masterclass and the glossary entry for the Value Drivers Register.

Ivan Gowan is Founder and CEO of Opagio. Lesson reviewed and edited by Mark Hillier, Co-Founder and CCO. Meet the team.

Lesson 5 Quiz

Check your understanding of this lesson.

Key terms from this lesson

Not sure where to start?

Eight minutes against The Opagio 12. The diagnostic surfaces the drivers that sit above and below sector median, classifies your funded state, and routes you to the highest-relevance asset first.

Take the diagnostic →

Put this into practice

Use the Opagio Valuator to apply what you have just learned to your own business.

Try the Valuator — free