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For Incubators & Accelerators / Design partners

Structured signal. Before you admit. Before the cohort starts.

Every program admits on instinct. Greenlight gives you evidence - on the idea and on the founder - before the cohort begins.

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The foundation

The logic your investment committee already uses.

Founder-market fit is how founding teams get evaluated before there is any product. We turn it into a structured, per-applicant read.

2011
Chris Dixon
Named founder-market fit as a leading indicator of reaching product-market fit: who is building matters nearly as much as what the market says about it.
4
NfX signals
Operationalized into four observable signals: domain obsession, founder story, personality, and relevant experience.
~30%
Bill Payne Scorecard
The standard pre-revenue valuation tool used by angel networks weights the management team at roughly 30% of total valuation - more than any other single factor.
Reality Check for your applicants
Your founders run a Reality Check. Your program gets the results.

Each founder in your pipeline runs a Reality Check: a same-day, AI-run read that answers the two questions every admission decision hinges on - is the market there, and is this the founder to serve it?

The Market Scan covers the market side: what customers already pay for and what that says about problem priority, timing and trend direction, and who controls access to the customer - each component rated plainly, with the evidence behind it.

The Founder-Market Fit read covers the founder side, across five advisory dimensions. Hover to see what each one asks:

Domain proximityHow close is the founder's background to this problem and this customer? Have they lived it, sold to it, or worked inside it? Execution capabilityDoes their background suggest they can actually ship and run this product? Channel & audience accessDoes the founder already have a path to the customers they need, or do they need to build it from scratch? Founder-customer empathyEvidence the founder understands the customer's world well enough to build for them, not for their own assumptions. Realistic execution riskWhere is this founder most likely to struggle, and how should they plan around it?

Your program receives the results as a clear, shareable report per founder - printable, comparable across your pipeline, with two questions answered and the evidence behind both.

One line to hold: the read is advisory. It does not change the market verdict, which is produced only from real market signal. A strong résumé doesn't rescue a red-light market result. A thin background doesn't disqualify a genuine green one. You get both reads, clearly separated, so you can weigh them yourself.

If your program screens on specific criteria - your own rubric for what a fundable team looks like - we can build the Founder-Market Fit component around your methodology. Per-program, confidential, shaped to how you actually work. That's a design-partner conversation, not a live self-serve feature. Bring it to the table when we talk.

If you're running a program and want structured signal on your applicants, let's talk.
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What compounds behind the read

Built now, sprint by sprint.

Every sprint adds to a structured dataset we are actively building: what founders brought to market, what the market said back, and how the founder's background correlated with the outcome. Most of what exists about founder-market fit was written by people who won. Ours includes the founders who ran a clean experiment and heard "no." That is the more instructive half.

Unlike a model or a methodology, that record - what real markets rejected, and why, and who was building it - is not something that can be easily replicated. It accumulates with every sprint. The programs that work with us at this stage help shape what gets captured and how the read is structured. That is a real advantage - for them and for us.

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Tell us about your program.

Reach out if you're an incubator, accelerator, or VC firm exploring partnership opportunities. We'd love to hear from you.

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