Use fundraising signals to spot companies right after they raise capital, when budget, urgency, and buying momentum are often at their highest.
By the end of this tutorial, you’ll know how to create a Company raised funds watchlist in lemlist, refine it with fundraising criteria, choose which companies to monitor, exclude company lists you don’t want to track, control daily volume, and route identified signals into your workflow.
Why this matters
Fundraising is a strong timing signal. When a company has just raised money, it often means new hiring plans, bigger budgets, and faster decision-making. With a fundraising watchlist, you can prioritize outreach when intent is freshest and personalize campaigns with funding details that make your messaging more relevant.
If you monitor All segments, you may otherwise receive signals for companies you already work with, such as existing customers, partners, or accounts your team should not contact. By excluding specific company lists, you can keep your signal feed focused on relevant, net-new opportunities.
Prerequisites
You should already have access to Signals in lemlist.
You should already know the basics of navigating your lemlist workspace.
If you want to exclude companies from All segments, make sure the relevant companies are already organized into a company list, such as Current Customers or Do Not Contact.
Core lesson — step-by-step workflow
Phase 1: Start a new watchlist
Open Signals and create a watchlist.
Go to Signals, then click New watchlist. This opens the guided setup flow where you’ll define the signal, audience, volume, and processing method.
Select the fundraising signal.
In the signal picker, choose Company raised funds, then click Next. This tells lemlist to look for fundraising events rather than hiring, job-change, or other signal types.
Phase 2: Configure your fundraising criteria
Set your fundraising amount range.
Enter the minimum amount in USD, and if needed, add a maximum amount as well. Use this to focus on the funding size that best matches your ideal customer profile—for example, early-stage companies or larger, more mature businesses.
Choose the funding round types you want to track.
Select one or more funding types, such as Seed, Series A, Debt financing, or other available round categories. This helps you align your outreach with the maturity stage of the companies you want to target.
Optionally narrow the signal to specific investors.
In the Investors field, add investor names one per line if you only want to monitor fundraising events involving certain firms. This is useful if you sell to companies backed by specific funds or investor networks.
Phase 3: Choose which companies to monitor
Select the source segment for monitoring.
In Segment to monitor, you can monitor only All segments.
Add inclusion filters.
You can refine the audience with filters such as industry, company size, and location. This helps keep your watchlist focused on companies that fit your ICP instead of tracking every fundraising event available.
Exclude company lists from All segments.
When you use All segments, a new Exclude company lists option lets you select one or more company lists you don’t want to track. Use this to filter out companies such as existing customers, partners, or a Do Not Contact list so only relevant signals appear in your results.Exclusions apply at the company list level, not the individual contact level.
Set a daily identification cap.
In Identification limit, choose the maximum number of signals to identify per day. This lets you control both lead volume and credit usage so your team only gets as many fundraising opportunities as it can realistically work.
Note: Excluded company lists are especially useful when you want broad coverage from All segments without surfacing signals from accounts you already know or actively want to avoid.
Phase 4: Decide how signals should be processed
Choose what happens after a signal is identified.
In Signals processing, decide whether to process signals manually or create a task for your team. If you select task creation, configure the task type, owner assignment, fallback owner, priority, title, and instructions. This step determines how fundraising signals move from detection into action.
Phase 5: Review and confirm your watchlist
Review the summary before finishing.
Check the final summary to confirm the signal type, amount range, selected investment types, billing, and processing configuration. This is the best place to catch mistakes before the watchlist goes live.
What each fundraising signal includes
Each identified fundraising signal can include the following company details:
Company name
Domain
Funding round type
Amount in USD and native currency
Announcement date
Investors
Source link to a news article or Crunchbase, when available
Billing
Fundraising signals are billed at 100 credits per identified fundraising event, charged only on success. Your daily cap directly affects your potential daily and monthly credit usage, so set it based on your team’s outreach capacity.
When using Exclude company lists, the maximum supported size is 10,000 companies/contacts per signal watchlist for performance reasons. This limit may be raised in the future based on user feedback.
Practical application / real-life example
Here are a few real-life examples of the kinds of fundraising events worth tracking:
A B2B SaaS company raises a $12M Series A and starts hiring AEs.
A climate tech company secures a $20M seed round and begins scaling operations.
A healthtech company announces a Series B and a European expansion.
What this actually means: new capital usually creates new headcount, new budgets, and new pressure to grow fast. The window between the public announcement and inbox overload is short, so the first relevant message often wins.
What to do: reach out immediately after the announcement. Keep your message brief, useful, and focused on their growth stage rather than on your product features.
Example fundraising follow-up email:
Hey {{firstName}}, congrats on the {{fundingRound}}! That's a big milestone, and usually a busy one. 😅
{{referenceCompany}} hit the same stage and scaled their outreach without adding headcount, booking {{metric}} meetings in {{timeFrame}}.
Want me to send over how they structured it?
{{senderName}}
You can personalize this kind of outreach with variables such as:
Company name
Funding type
Amount raised
Announcement date
Investors
Typical use case: if your team monitors all fundraising activity but only wants net-new opportunities, exclude a Current Customers list or Do Not Contact list so reps only see companies they can actually work.
Troubleshooting & pitfalls
Issue: I’m getting too many fundraising signals.
Root cause: Your audience is too broad or your daily cap is too high.
Reduce the maximum number of signals identified per day.
Add inclusion filters such as industry, company size, or location.
Exclude company lists such as Current Customers or Do Not Contact when monitoring All segments.
Narrow the watchlist with a minimum amount or specific funding round types.
Issue: The companies don’t match my target market.
Root cause: The watchlist is too broad or not filtered by the right fundraising criteria.
Review your funding type selections.
Set a more precise minimum amount.
Use Exclude company lists to remove companies your team already works with or does not want to target.
Issue: Credit usage is higher than expected.
Root cause: Billing applies per successfully identified fundraising event.
Remember that billing is 100 credits per identified fundraising event.
Lower your daily cap to control spend.
Use tighter audience and fundraising filters to improve relevance.
Exclude irrelevant company lists from All segments so you do not spend credits reviewing signals from known accounts.
Issue: I need broad monitoring, but I don’t want signals from existing customers or blocked accounts.
Root cause:All segments includes companies that may already exist in your active account universe.
Use the Exclude company lists option in the Segment to monitor step.
Create or update company lists such as Current Customers, Partners, or Do Not Contact.
Remember that exclusions are based on company lists, not individual contacts.
Keep the total size within 10,000 companies/contacts per signal watchlist.
Issue: My team sees signals but doesn’t act on them quickly.
Root cause: Signals are being identified, but no clear workflow is attached.
Use Create a task for the identified signals during setup.
Assign the right owner type and fallback owner.
Add clear task instructions so reps know how to follow up.