Every founder I know hits the same wall on a raise. You can find investor names in an afternoon. What you cannot find, without a lot of tab-switching, is which of them writes a cheque the size of your round.
Signal by NFX publishes that. It maintains public investor lists organised by sector and stage, and each investor carries a cheque-size range. The lists are public, no login, but they paginate eight at a time through a private endpoint, so copying one into a spreadsheet by hand is a genuinely bad afternoon.
I did it by hand once. Then I stopped doing it by hand.
Disclosure: the Apify links in this post are affiliate links. If you run the Actor, I may earn a referral commission at no extra cost to you.
What the NFX Signal investor data actually contains
The NFX Signal Investor API returns venture investors, VC firms, and the investor-list catalog as structured JSON, including the minimum, target, and maximum cheque each investor writes.
| What you get | Detail |
|---|---|
| Investor | name, position, profile link, headshot |
| Cheque size |
minInvestment, targetInvestment, maxInvestment in USD |
| Firm |
firmName, firmUrl
|
| Context | investment locations, other lists they appear on, source list stage and sector |
| Catalog | 349 lists across 103 sectors, four stages, and 14 geographies |
The largest single list, fintech-seed, holds 8,775 investors. san-francisco-bay-area holds 8,246.
Who this is for
- Founders raising, who need a target list ordered by the cheque they actually need.
- Anyone selling to VCs, who needs a firm directory for a CRM rather than individual partners.
- Analysts mapping a market, who want to see which firms show up across AI, FinTech, and climate lists.
The DIY path, and where it breaks
You can do this by hand. Open a list page, copy the eight visible investors, click load more, repeat. For a 300-investor list that is roughly 38 rounds of clicking.
Scripting it is not much better at first pass. The page is server rendered, so the first batch is in the HTML, but everything after that comes from a cursor-paginated endpoint that the page calls as you scroll. You end up reverse engineering the pagination, then handling the fact that cheque sizes come back as strings, that geography is modelled as a sector rather than a location field, and that a "firm" on a list is only a name and a link until you enrich it.
None of that is hard. It is just a day you did not plan to spend.
The shortcut: run it as an API
Console. Open the NFX Signal Investor API, pick a mode, hit Start.
REST. One call, no login to the source needed:
curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/johnvc~nfx-signal-investor-api/run-sync-get-dataset-items" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $APIFY_TOKEN" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"mode":"investors","listSlugs":["saas-seed"],"maxItems":50}'
The run endpoint is documented in the Apify API reference.
MCP. Point any MCP client at the server below and an agent can call it directly:
https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=actors,docs,johnvc/nfx-signal-investor-api
That last one matters more than it looks. "Which seed investors back developer tools, and what do they write?" is a question an agent can now answer from live data instead of memory.
How to find investors for a startup, by stage and cheque size
The one I use most. Pick the lists that match your round, then sort by targetInvestment:
{ "mode": "investors", "listSlugs": ["saas-seed"], "maxItems": 100 }
{
"result_type": "investor",
"name": "Brendan Wallace",
"position": "managing_partner",
"minInvestment": 10000000,
"targetInvestment": 12500000,
"maxInvestment": 25000000,
"firmName": "Fifth Wall Ventures",
"personUrl": "https://signal.nfx.com/investors/brendan-wallace"
}
Ready to run: Find Investors for Your Startup by Stage and Check Size.
Getting a list of VC firms in San Francisco
Switch to firms mode and you get the firm directory instead of individual partners, which is the shape you want for a CRM import.
{ "mode": "firms", "listSlugs": ["san-francisco-bay-area"] }
Ready to run: List of VC Firms in San Francisco Bay Area.
Pre seed investors, with the cheque sizes attached
Pre-seed is the stage where cheque size matters most and is published least consistently. Three sector lists in one run:
{ "mode": "investors", "listSlugs": ["fintech-pre-seed", "saas-pre-seed", "ai-pre-seed"], "maxItems": 500 }
Ready to run: Pre Seed Investors List With Check Sizes.
Using it as a Crunchbase alternative
It complements those tools rather than replacing them, and the difference is worth being precise about. Crunchbase and PitchBook are company-centric: they tell you what a company raised. This is investor-centric: it tells you who invests, at what stage, and what they write. You can attach Crunchbase data per firm in the same run:
{ "mode": "investors", "listSlugs": ["ai-seed"], "maxItems": 100, "enrichWithCrunchbase": true }
Ready to run: Crunchbase Alternative for Investor and VC Firm Data.
Browsing the whole VC database first
Slugs are not guessable, so start here. lists mode returns the catalog with a slug, stage, sector, and investor count for each of the 349 lists.
{ "mode": "lists" }
Ready to run: VC Database Export by Sector and Stage.
Exporting a Signal NFX list to JSON or CSV
If you just want one list out of the browser and into a file, this is the plain version, no enrichment, no filtering: Export Signal NFX Investor Lists to JSON or CSV.
Tracking new investors entering your sector
An export is a snapshot. Save the input as a Task, attach a monthly Schedule, and diff the runs to see who entered your sector: Track New Investors Joining a VC List Each Month.
The example repo
johnisanerd
/
Apify-NFX-Signal-Investor-API
NFX Signal Investor API examples: find investors, check sizes, and a list of VC firms from Signal by NFX as JSON. Python + MCP quick start.
NFX Signal Investor API: find investors, check sizes, and VC firms
Python and MCP examples for the NFX Signal Investor API on Apify. It turns Signal by NFX investor lists into structured JSON: venture investors, the VC firms behind them, and the check size each investor actually writes.
Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to NFX. It reads the same public investor lists any visitor can browse.
Text walkthrough
If you have ever searched for how to find investors for a startup, the hard part is not finding names, it is finding the right names with the right cheque size. This API starts from the public Signal NFX investor lists: 349 of them, spanning 103 sectors and four stages from pre-seed to Series B. Run mode: "lists" first and you get the whole catalog with a slug, a stage, a sector, and an investor count for each one. Pick…
Python quick start with uv, five task-aligned helper functions, and MCP install walkthroughs for Claude Cowork, Claude Code, Claude on the web, Cursor, and ChatGPT.
FAQ about scraping NFX Signal investor data
Do I need an NFX account to use this scraper?
No. It reads the public investor lists on signal.nfx.com, so no account, cookie, or token is needed for the source. You only need an Apify token to run the Actor.
Should I build my own scraper for this instead?
If you need one list once, scrape it yourself, it is a fair afternoon of work. The pagination, the stringified cheque amounts, and the firm enrichment chain are the parts that make it a maintenance job rather than a script.
Can I use this scraper from Claude or another AI agent?
Yes, over MCP. Point the client at the server URL above and the agent can discover the input schema and run it, which turns "who invests in my sector" into a live query.
Can I schedule this scraper to run every month?
Yes. Save your input as a Task, attach a Schedule, and diff each run. The monthly tracking example is set up for exactly that.
What does this scraper not give me?
Two honest limits. Not every investor publishes a cheque range, and those fields come back empty rather than estimated. And firm enrichment resolves by company name, so a firm with an ambiguous name may come back without LinkedIn or Crunchbase fields attached; you are not charged for the ones that miss.
More from Truffle Pig Data
This Actor is catalogued on Alpha OSINT alongside the rest of the financial and company data sources.
Try it
Run the NFX Signal Investor API on a single list first, with maxItems set low, and see whether the cheque sizes change how you build your list. That is the part I did not expect to matter as much as it does.
Top comments (1)
The eight-investor pagination makes a 300-name list roughly 38 rounds of clicking, so turning the cursor-paginated results into structured data is a sensible bit of leverage. Sorting
saas-seedbytargetInvestmentis useful, and the monthly diff can reveal firms newly appearing in a sector. I'd still treat cheque-size fit as the first filter rather than the final ranking: recent deal activity, lead-versus-follow behavior, ownership targets, and partner-level thesis fit usually determine whether a technically eligible investor is worth a founder's limited outreach time.