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.
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. |