Low efficiency in project financing matchmaking? FreeS Fund's BONFUND wants to make everything easier

FreeS Fund internally incubated a tool called BONFUND. Built on top of the WeChat official account "贝字旁" (WeChat ID: bonfund), BONFUND helps investors view key information in real time and easily track project progress, while also making it convenient for founders to push information to investors.

Tired of SaaS Tools Matching VCs with Deals? FreeS Fund's BONFUND Does Something Different

Source / Tuopu She

Author / Haiyang

Send your pitch deck, trek halfway across the city for a chat, "let's keep in touch," and become WeChat-liking acquaintances with investors — that's the old playbook for fundraising. For investors, the first few minutes of a conversation usually determine the outcome, yet the time both sides invest often runs twenty times longer.

The abysmal success rate of deal-sourcing comes down to that perennial problem: information asymmetry. High-value signals get drowned out by noise, and a company's basic profile no longer captures a VC's attention.

This is precisely why FreeS Fund built BONFUND. At first glance, this SaaS product — built on the WeChat official account "贝字旁" (WeChat ID: bonfund) — looks like any other matching platform. But look closer and the design choices reveal themselves: FreeS Fund understands how investors actually work and where they lose efficiency. So on BONFUND's startup showcase pages, a single screen contains everything an investor wants to see.

▲ Individual project showcase page.

The project pages are information-dense, covering company details, a pitch video under two minutes, fundraising progress, a standardized pitch deck condensed to five pages, plus Q&A. An investor can digest all of this in minutes — enough to decide whether to take a meeting.

If an investor wants to view sensitive data or meet the founder, they can send a request directly; once approved, further communication opens up. The page can also be shared within WeChat, making it easy for founders to push information to investors.

BONFUND enables real-time communication among founders, existing shareholders, and prospective investors, with monthly reports delivered regularly to shareholders. This reduces time costs while making each fundraising round more transparent. The pitch video on a project's homepage can be updated three times a year, suiting founders at rapidly evolving businesses who need to adjust their fundraising rhythm.

▲ Investors can track projects lightly, over the long term.

Investors can choose to "follow" or "bookmark" projects, and when a project's product or business hits a major milestone, they can keep tabs with minimal friction. These curated, information-rich project profiles become an efficient hunting ground for investment targets. Investors also receive push notifications at critical moments, so they don't miss the right time to reach out.

▲ Founders on the BONFUND platform.

What does BONFUND mean for FreeS Fund?

• FreeS Fund's portfolio companies can use BONFUND to protect their pitch decks and curate relevant investors.
• BONFUND is open to peer firms. Multiple top-tier VC institutions have already joined, attempting to integrate market ecosystem from the capital side and help the industry become more efficient.
• If BONFUND proves effective, it would be entirely logical for a new fund focused on later-stage deals to emerge.

Li Feng, partner at FreeS Fund, said: "This is a useful experiment. It digitizes the initial information exchange between founders and VCs, and as a tool aligned with how VCs evaluate deals, it can relatively improve efficiency and protect both sides' privacy to some degree."

Currently BONFUND is free for FreeS Fund portfolio companies and open to industry peers.