What is a Company Update?

A Company Update is a structured record of news from a founder for a specific deal. Each update captures the KPIs the founder reported, the wins they shared, the asks they made of investors, team changes, and press mentions -- all extracted automatically from a founder email so investors get a consistent, scannable view of how the company is doing.

The platform turns a free-form email like "Hey investors -- February was strong, MRR is $48k, we hired two engineers, and we'd love intros to data infra buyers" into a structured update with a TLDR, a headline metric, a KPI table, an asks list, and a wins list. From the investor's perspective, they just see the latest news for the companies they backed.

How Company Updates Relate to Other Entities

Every Company Update belongs to a single Deal. The deal is the company; the update is one snapshot of how that company is doing at a point in time. A deal can have many updates over its life (monthly, quarterly, annual, event-driven).

Each update is derived from one or more sources. Today the only source is a Founder Email -- a forwarded message from a founder that the platform received and processed. Future source types (press releases, podcast transcripts, social posts) plug into the same shape.

Updates are linked to investors through the deal. An investor sees a Company Update for a deal only if they have a funded investment in that deal. See Visibility & Retraction for the full rules.

The Lifecycle of an Update

Every Company Update moves through these states:

The expected path is Extracting → Published. Retraction and hiding are admin-driven actions and are always audit-logged.

What Lives Inside an Update

A published update can contain:

• TLDR -- a one- or two-sentence summary written by the extractor
• Headline metric -- the single most important number the founder led with (e.g. MRR, ARR, runway)
• KPIs -- structured metric rows (name, value, unit, change vs prior period), each with the original sentence cited verbatim from the founder's email
• Wins -- product launches, hires, customer wins, press mentions
• Asks -- specific requests of investors (intros, hires, feedback)
• Team changes -- who joined, who left, role changes
• Press mentions -- publications, articles, podcasts
• Sentiment -- positive, neutral, mixed, or concerning (what the tone of the email reads as)
• Period -- the month, quarter, or year the update covers (e.g. "February 2026")
• Sources -- the original founder email(s) and any duplicates or corroborating messages

Every KPI carries the exact paragraph from the founder's email it was extracted from, so the ops team can always verify a value at a glance.

What Admins Can Do

From the Investor Communications → Company Updates admin page, the ops team can:

• Review the queue -- updates with KPIs that need attention float to the top
• Approve, edit, or reject each KPI before it appears on investor surfaces
• Resolve asks that the founder has reported as filled
• Re-extract an update if the AI got something wrong and you want it to try again
• Hide an update so investors don't see it (silent)
• Retract an update with a reason that investors do see in place of the body

The companion Investor Communications → Founder Emails page shows the raw inbound side -- the emails the platform received and how they were routed. See Founder Emails.

Why This Exists

Founders send updates as plain emails to a mix of investors, friends, and advisors. Historically that meant the investment record stopped at "they invested." Company Updates capture the post-investment narrative in a way that:

• Investors can browse without digging through their inbox
• Charts and portfolio summaries can use without re-reading every email
• The Casey AI assistant can answer "how is Arcadia doing this quarter?" without an admin having to summarize anything

The whole pipeline is designed so the ops team only has to look at the small slice of updates the AI flagged as uncertain. Everything else is auto-approved and goes straight through.