The Signed Blog

Today we’re launching an MCP Server for your investment portfolio.

MCP

At its core, MCP just enables your AI assistant — Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, OpenClaw, whatever —  to have direct access to your data. You aren’t tied to whatever we at Signed build for you; you can ask your AI agent to read your data, write new data, present it in weird and funky ways, whatever you want.

It’s pretty easy to get started: just add `https://mcp.signed.com` as a custom MCP server in your favored AI agent, and then it’ll prompt you to sign in to Signed over the familiar OAuth protocol that the web has been using for years.

Important Business Queries

There’s a *bunch* of stuff you can do to get a better handle on your angel portfolio. You might use it to get better at selecting startups, or improve your communication with your portfolio companies, or to help find blind spots in your own selection approach. You can ask your agent questions like:

Read every note and pass reason in my pipeline and tell me what my actual investment thesis is — not the one I say I have.

Or:

Read the last two quarters of investor updates and flag the companies that are quietly slowing down — where the tone shifted before the numbers did.

Or:

Compare the companies I followed on into against the ones I didn't. Did my follow-on instincts add value, or would blind pro-rata have beaten me?

Or:

Draft my annual letter to myself, LP-style: what I deployed, what worked, what I'd tell myself twelve months ago.

The idea, like all things on Signed, is to get you to become a better investor, generate higher returns, and help your portfolio companies out.

Workflows

A lot of the benefit of AI is that can help step in and facilitate a *workflow* during your investment process. From that perspective, you’re not just doing a more static prompt-and-answer process with your companies… you’re building a process that can be proactive and keep you focused.

Which is a lot of words, of course, but what does it actually mean? A few things I’ve personally started doing with my agent over the last month that have helped out a ton:

• My agent will ping me every day if there’s a pitch that’s been in my pitch pipeline that I haven’t responded to or updated in a couple days. I hate the black hole that startup pitches sometimes face, and I really try to stay on top of my diligence pipeline so founders aren’t waiting on me for so long. (I mean, they still do, but I’m working on that.)
• I generate notes from most of my meetings. My agent will notice the new meeting notes from Granola, determine if it ties into a company in my portfolio or pitch pipeline, and then add the meeting notes as a Note attached to that company. This has been wildly helpful to have this data in conjunction with another feature that we’ll be shipping in the near future, too.
• As an angel, it’s my money I invest, and I have a few types of founders and companies that I just do not invest in. When a new pitch comes in to Signed, my agent will diligence it from that cultural fit perspective and then post a comment on the pitch with what it found. This has helped me save everyone some time by being able to pass earlier than normal, skipping a meeting or two that wouldn’t end up going anywhere.

One you get into the habit of thinking of workflow rather than just prompts, you realize how many proactive things you can build into investing to allow you to focus on what really matters: helping companies grow.

Funsies

Obviously with AI you can do whatever you want, though. We’ve been having a lot of fun with some less-obvious prompts, too:

Assume I'm a genius and every pass was correct. Write the press release announcing my new fund on that basis.

Or:

Make the strongest possible case that my worst investment was actually my best one, and that I'm the only person who can see it.

Or:

Write my portfolio's 2030 obituary assuming everything went wrong. Then write the one where everything went right.

This one was particularly amusing, ending with this lovely bit of prose: “Signed, the tool built to make sense of all this, remained the best-instrumented and detail-oriented view of a portfolio that was inevitably doomed.” That might be our new tagline: Signed, where you know down to the penny how much money you’re burning.

AI

Jokes aside, Signed over MCP has been pretty spectacular to use over the last few weeks. Much like the transition from “a mediocre angel investment spreadsheet” to “everything is detailed in Signed” was a large leap, going from “everything in Signed” to “everything can be investigated now” has been eye-opening. Give it a shot!

A lot of things happen in your portfolio on Signed! From founders sending you new pitches, to investor updates getting parsed and filed away, to all your metrics staying updated and recalculating in real-time... it can be a lot for a fancy-pants investor like you to stay on top of it.

We're adding portfolio digest emails today to Signed. Each Monday we'll shoot an email with the details of what happened the last week in your portfolio:

It's designed to give you a quick heads-up on your investments, like: giving a heads-up on pitches you might not have diligenced yet, any valuation marks that happened, the latest investor updates, new features from Signed itself, etc.

These will send out weekly if you have interesting things happening in your portfolio recently; otherwise, we'll downshift it to monthly for a larger recap on everything.

And, of course, you're always in control! Just hit unsubscribe or head to your email preferences if you want to change these settings at any point.

Hot off the heels of our new pitch economics sidebar in your pitch pipeline, we now auto-extract and track discounts of that particular investment's raise:

There's also a nice new visual showing how close they to completing the round.

As always, all of these metrics can be one-clicked to enter and update the values, or we'll auto-extract them from the pitch deck, any notes you've entered, or other details you might be tracking about the company.

Quick addition to the site: you can now add some notes to yourself when you change a company's valuation.

When you click on Update valuation on a company, you'll see a new section of the form:

Depending on how you want to track your valuation markups (and markdowns), it's a helpful spot to note any SPVs you might see, secondary sales, or press releases for new fundraising for your portfolio companies.

We'll also show it in your investment timeline, too:

When someone pitches their startup to you, you'll see a new section detailing the current round on the sidebar:

You'll get a quick look at valuation, revenue, and raise details. To add or change them? Just click each and update it directly (and, of course, you can use Signed's Currency Magic™ to quickly add these values).

Having to press keys like a Neanderthal really turning you off to using this feature? No matter. Like most of Signed, we also run the pitch deck and all your notes through an LLM to pick these numbers up for you without you lifting a finger. Once a pitch has been added to your pipeline, we'll go through everything we know about a company and pre-fill those values that we find.

Signed's future might be bright, but this website ain't.

We've been flirting with it since launching, but decided to rip off the band-aid and go full dark mode. Should make your up-and-to-the-right charts pop even more.

We've also made a few other changes- going to a more functional header instead of the dangling-left-sidebar, as well as updated the Blog and our area to Learn about angel investing to also ditch the bright blue backgrounds.

Will it make you a better investor? Probably. I mean, it worked for Bloomberg terminals, can't be bad for you.

Your angel portfolio has a lot of sensitive data in it: both financial (your economic performance) and legal (startups share privileged data with you). Makes all the sense to worry about who can access that information.

Today we're adding a new multi-factor authentication to Signed: Passkeys.

Passkeys have been slowly taking over security on the web; traditional methods like SMS authentication has been broken for quite some time, and Passkeys is seeing strong support in browsers, OS integration, and password managers like 1Password.

You can set up your own Passkeys in a new Passkeys page in Settings. A couple notes to keep in mind:

• You'll want to have Passkeys generated on more than one device, so if you lose your phone or your laptop you have a backup so you can continue to sign in to Signed
• You'll also be able to download a set of recovery keys, for when everything Goes Wrong and you need to use one of your backup codes to access your account. Save 'em in a safe place.
• Once you enable passkey sign in, you no longer can sign in with your email and password.

Once set up, signing in is a one-click operation (depending on how your browser or OS is set up):

...then enjoy your hecka secure account. 🔒

A big part of your angel portfolio is the part that touches the files of each investment: pitch decks, legal documents, financial projects, and so on. Signed is designed to take all of that in, make it searchable, and let you ask questions and query it.

Today we're adding something that we're calling Global File Upload. Previously, you could be on the "Files" tab of a given investment, or on the new investment screen, and you could simply drag and drop a file to attach it to that specific company. Now, you can do that anywhere.

Any time you're on a page on Signed, you can drag and drop a file on desktop to the browser window and you'll get dropped into a new upload flow:

At this point, this triggers a number of things:

• your document gets analyzed by AI (if you're on a paid account) for information about the company and the investment
• if it's a pitch deck or deal memo, we'll start crunching highlights and a synopsis of the company so you can learn more about it
• we either add it to an existing company, or create a new company or pitch if we haven't seen the company before

AI isn't everything, though, and sometimes it does make mistakes. There's a new "merge company" button at the top of new company and pitch pages now, which lets you merge an errant new company in with an existing company. We'll also attempt to de-duplicate any investment details if you've already included them on the previous company.

If you're already looking at a company and you just want to add another file to the company without worrying whether the file will match that company or not, you can just drag and drop onto that page and we'll add it directly. If you're adding a new file to a different company, you can also drag it to that new company instead:

This'll all help you more quickly create new companies, track dealflow, and attach your docs to the right place! Happy... attaching?

Hey you! You, that wonderful investor you. I bet as the dashing and forward-thinking startup investor that you are, you probably have a website, or blog, or tiny piece of the internet to call your own. And that's great! Because you can use it as your own platform to attract founders, build dealflow, and generally improve your angel investing portfolio as you go.

Signed now has a quick and easy way to embed your portfolio and investor profile on your website. Here's a few live examples of what you can do:

Pitch a startup

Makes it easy for your readers and users to submit directly to your Pitches section on Signed, so you can collect their pitch decks, company information, founder information, and all sorts of things.

Your investor profile

We've been adding more focus on social investing as of late: the idea that who you are as an investor matters, and how you interact with the rest of the angel investor community matters as well. This embed gives you a quick and easy way to show off your background.

Your highlighted investments

Finally, you can show off some investments you'd like to highlight. You know, those big, awesome, interesting wins you've found as an investor that you'd like to use to attract other founders to your portfolio. And naturally, these promoted investments are all explicitly opt-in: we won't display anything unless you select your highlighted investments on your settings page.

The fun part of all this is, of course, it's all kept up-to-date right along with all your normal portfolio needs on Signed. If you've ever tried to keep a list of investments or details about what you look for up-to-date and current on your About page... well, you'd know that's the first to be ignored as you focus on other more fun stuff. So: embed away!

You can now edit the company name and URL right from your sidebar:

You know, for all you who haven't added full domain data to your investments. It's very hip and cool, and unlocks a bunch of stuff now and in the future- so when you see an investment without a domain... fill 'er up.