Fools.com - Raise your friends, family, and fools round.
Small checks from early believers, made legal and legible.
Fools exists so that a founder without a wealthy network can raise a first round from the people who already believe in them, and so that every one of those checks is treated seriously.
The network gap
If your first checks depend on wealthy blood relatives, most founders never start. Capital formation should not require a trust fund in the family tree.
The friends, family and fools round
The oldest name for a first raise: checks from early believers who back the founder before any institution does. Expanding that circle takes process, not pressure.
Treat every check seriously
A standardized Crowd SAFE, clear risk disclosure, and only money people can afford to lose entirely. Money movement is the core. Without a path to real capital, the idea is worthless.
What is live today
- Now
- The founder workspace, in use by a pilot founder on a licensed funding portal.
- Next
- Partner rails, so commitments made on the portal appear in the workspace.
- Later
- Backing on Fools, once the partner agreement and counsel review are complete. Fools is not currently offering securities.
The name
Fools.com - Raise your friends, family, and fools round. The name is the oldest phrase for a first raise, and it is the whole product: the people who back a founder before any institution does. On Fools the people who write those checks are backers, and the people who raise are founders. Nobody is called anything else.
Fools is a capital-formation platform, not an advisor. We don't recommend, rank, or endorse companies; federal crowdfunding rules prohibit it, and our neutrality is the point. Fools is not affiliated with The Motley Fool® or fool.com.
What Fools does not do
The product, stated from the other side. Each answer is a rule we hold, not a feature we have not got round to.
- Does Fools pick, rank or endorse companies?
- No. Every company is shown the same way. The screening room orders only by objective criteria you choose, such as close date or category. Federal crowdfunding rules prohibit a platform from giving investment advice, and neutrality is the point.
- Does Fools write my outreach or my pitch?
- No. Founders write their own words. Fools structures the round, tracks the conversations and checks the list. It never generates a message, a post or a pitch for you. A first raise is personal.
- Does Fools contact backers for me, or introduce me to them?
- No. You send everything. Fools does not send outreach on your behalf and never shows your round to another founder's contacts.
- Does Fools hold or move money?
- No. Fools never touches funds. In a real raise, money goes into escrow at a qualified bank or broker-dealer and is released only if the round closes. In this preview no real funds move at all.
- Is Fools a funding portal or a broker-dealer?
- No. Fools is not registered as either. A real Regulation Crowdfunding raise runs through a registered intermediary of record, and Fools builds the founder and backer experience around it.
- Does Fools give investment, legal or tax advice?
- No. The risk register says plainly that most early-stage companies return nothing. That is disclosure, not advice. Bring your own counsel.
- Does Fools charge founders to list, or backers to back?
- No. For the pilot, Fools is not compensated at all. Any later fee is unset and goes to counsel first.
Fees, provisionally
For the pilot round Fools is not compensated. The fee shape for later rounds is not set and will be confirmed with counsel. Any figure you see in our simulated math (an illustrative 5% success fee) is a provisional placeholder for modelling, not a price. It will never be a fee for advice or for picking companies.
The team
Fools is built by a small team in the United States. Names, backgrounds and how to reach us will appear here before the first public round.