ScoringFactory raises $499,950 to turn VC taste into software

Matt McLeod, the co-founder and president of ScoringFactory, has raised $499,950 for an AI system designed to encode how venture investors judge founders and how their portfolio companies judge candidates.

A Form D filed September 15th shows that Scoring Factory AI Inc. sold the equity to one investor on September 14th. ScoringFactory is seeking $999,900 in total, leaving exactly $499,950 available in the offering. The filing identifies the buyer only as an accredited investor and does not establish a valuation.

McLeod signed the filing as president. The filing also names Harlem Capital co-founder Henri Pierre-Jacques as an executive officer and director, and fellow Harlem Capital co-founder Jarrid Tingle as a director. ScoringFactory's own biography lists Pierre-Jacques as responsible for sales and go-to-market work, describing him as an investor who is building the diligence tool he wished he had.

That pairing is the substance of ScoringFactory's pitch. McLeod brings product experience, while Pierre-Jacques and Tingle have spent years evaluating founders and building a venture firm. ScoringFactory is attempting to convert the judgment developed through that work into repeatable software without presenting the software as a replacement for the investor.

Turning partner taste into software

McLeod's biography describes him as a product and AI builder who took products from zero to one at Maven AGI and Supersure, and shipped generative AI tools for teams backed by Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz and Accel. ScoringFactory does not give dates or roles for that work, but the background fits the task McLeod has set for himself: turning a subjective process into a configurable enterprise product.

A September 15th AlleyWatch funding report described ScoringFactory as an AI-powered scoring engine for venture teams and hiring managers that evaluates founders and candidates against customized, evidence-backed rubrics.

ScoringFactory's thesis is that good investors and operators already possess valuable judgment, but apply it unevenly because the evidence is scattered and each reviewer interprets the bar differently. The product is meant to preserve that judgment in a form that can be audited, shared and reused.

That evidence-backed positioning gives ScoringFactory a practical answer to the black-box problem. A score becomes much less useful inside an investment committee or hiring review when nobody can explain how the model reached it.

ScoringFactory claims its system scored 513,002 profiles in one run. The website does not identify whether that figure came from a customer deployment, internal test or demonstration dataset, so it should be read as a performance claim rather than a measure of commercial adoption. ScoringFactory has not attached customer names, revenue or contract volume to the number.

Harlem Capital's founders cross the table

Pierre-Jacques and Tingle give ScoringFactory direct exposure to the workflow it is selling into. The pair met as colleagues at ICV Partners in 2015, after beginning their careers in investment banking, according to a Harvard Business School account of Harlem Capital's formation.

They began Harlem Capital as an angel syndicate investing personal money alongside four colleagues. The group later narrowed its focus to venture investments in diverse founders. Pierre-Jacques and Tingle made Harlem Capital their full-time work after graduating from Harvard Business School in 2019.

ScoringFactory's product reflects that background. Investment firms often describe their advantage as taste, pattern recognition or access. Those qualities are difficult to transfer from a senior partner to a junior investor, and harder to apply consistently across a growing pipeline. Pierre-Jacques is now helping sell software built around the claim that a fund's selection criteria can be documented and scaled.

The roles also require careful separation from the financing. The SEC filing identifies Pierre-Jacques and Tingle as ScoringFactory insiders, while naming only one investor in the offering. It does not say that Harlem Capital, either managing partner or an affiliated vehicle purchased the securities.

A crowded market for automated judgment

ScoringFactory enters a market where several products already help investors filter deals and automate diligence. VCOS scores incoming pitch decks against a fund's thesis and extracts signals from decks, transcripts and data rooms. Landscape offers AI-assisted diligence, market mapping and a configurable founder-ranking tool. Inverio scores startup deals across 15 dimensions and uses an evidence-verification framework.

McLeod's broader bet spans investing, hiring and sales through one customer-specific scoring framework. That gives ScoringFactory a larger potential contract footprint, but it also means competing with specialist products in each department. The shared scoring framework only becomes an advantage if customers want one institutional rubric to influence several kinds of decisions.

ScoringFactory says customer data is encrypted in transit and at rest, stored in isolated databases and excluded from training shared models. ScoringFactory uses infrastructure described as SOC 2 Type II certified, while its own SOC 2 Type II report, SSO, role-based access and audit logs remain on its roadmap.

The first close gives McLeod enough capital to begin testing whether investors will pay to formalize the very judgment they often treat as proprietary instinct. Pierre-Jacques and Tingle provide a credible route into that customer base. The harder task is proving that a score can make a decision more consistent without sanding away the exceptions that produce venture returns.