Founder Emails

The Investor Communications → Founder Emails admin page is the raw inbound side of the Company Updates pipeline. Every email a founder sends (or that an investor forwards to us) lands here. The page lets the ops team see the assignment that was made, the source body, and any reason the platform chose to skip an email instead of promoting it.

Most of the time, an admin never needs to open this page -- the pipeline routes founder emails to the right deal automatically and promotes them into Company Updates without intervention. The page exists for the edge cases.

The Pipeline in One Picture

The whole sequence is automatic. Each step writes an audit entry so the path any email took is traceable end-to-end.

Statuses

Every Founder Email sits in one of these states:

Scopes (Quick Filters)

The page provides a few filters that match the common day-to-day questions:

• Needs review -- show only emails that the routing pipeline couldn't finish on its own
• Pending -- show only emails still waiting to be processed
• Completed -- successfully routed (most rows live here)
• Failed -- something went wrong; check the error message
• Promotion eligible -- completed emails that match all the criteria to be turned into a Company Update
• Skipped by Intake -- the AI looked at this email and decided it isn't an investor update (newsletter, transactional, off-topic, etc.) -- with a reason
• Company generic -- the sender was a generic company address (info@, updates@, team@) instead of a specific founder
• Forwarded -- the email was forwarded by someone other than the founder (e.g. an admin or another investor forwarded a founder update)

Why an Email Was Skipped

When the intake step decides an email isn't an investor update, it records a Skip Reason. The most common reasons:

• The email is a newsletter, a transactional notification, or otherwise not investor-facing
• The platform can't tie it back to a deal with confidence
• The body looks empty or unreadable after cleaning
• It's a duplicate of an email already promoted

Skipped emails stay in the list (with the reason) so an admin can override the decision if needed.

Manual Actions

For the small percentage of emails the platform can't route on its own:

• Rerun assignment -- re-runs the AI assignment job from scratch. Use after assigning a deal or founder by hand, or when the original assignment failed and you've changed something upstream.
• Mark as completed -- if the email is correctly routed (deal assigned) but the platform won't flip it on its own, you can mark it complete manually. The completion gate requires at least a deal assignment; a founder is optional for emails sent from a generic company address.
• Edit deal / founder / deal-founder assignment -- override the AI's choice by picking the correct one.

You can also re-run assignment for many emails at once via the batch action -- useful after a data fix where you want to re-process a whole cohort.

Forwarded Emails

When an investor or admin forwards a founder update to the platform, the platform unpacks the forwarded chain:

• The true sender is the founder (the person inside the forwarded message), not the person who hit Forward
• The dates distinguish between when the founder originally sent the email and when it was forwarded -- both are stored, and both surface on the Company Update so the timeline is honest
• The body is cleaned to strip the forward chrome (the "---------- Forwarded message ---------" block and quoted reply headers) before extraction runs

The Forwarded scope filters to just these emails so you can verify the chain looked right.

When to Touch This Page

You usually don't. The page is here for:

• Triaging Needs review rows -- a handful per week, typically
• Fixing a wrong assignment -- the AI picked the wrong deal; correct it and rerun
• Diagnosing why an update never appeared -- if an investor asks "where's the Arcadia February update?", start here, check the status and any skip reason
• Auditing what we received -- the page is the source of truth for every email the platform got from a founder

Everything user-facing for investors flows through the Review Queue once an email is promoted. This page is purely the intake side.