search_investors and outreach sequences, Helium runs a handful of
background checks that surface new information without you asking for it —
most run automatically the moment their prerequisite is met (Gmail
connected, a profile field set), and one is an on-demand tool you call
yourself. None of these require a separate “monitoring” signup — each one
turns on the moment its own specific prerequisite below is satisfied.
What’s free vs billed
The only billed item on this page is the on-demand
find_lookalike_investors
call — everything else here is monitoring-tier and never debits your credit
balance, even when it internally reuses the same research logic as a billed
endpoint.
Reply classification
No setup beyond having an active outreach sequence — this runs automatically as part of the same 15-minute cadence check that drafts and sends touches. The safety property here is unconditional and doesn’t depend on classification succeeding: the moment Helium detects a real reply in the Gmail thread, it stops the sequence immediately — no further touches are drafted or sent. Classification only changes what the Slack message says afterward; it never gates or delays the halt itself. If the classification call fails for any reason (a model error, an unparseable response), the sequence has already stopped, and Helium just falls back to a generic “they replied” message instead of a categorized one. When classification succeeds, Helium sorts the reply into one of five categories —interested, meeting_ask, pass, referral, unclear — and
adds one short, generic suggested next step. The suggestion is deliberately
generic advice tied to the category (e.g. “propose a few concrete times”),
never an invented fact about the investor, the fund, or a dollar amount:
✋ Stopped the sequence to Jane VC <jane@examplevc.com> — they replied. No further touches will be sent. Reply type: 📅 Wants to meet Suggested next step: Propose a few concrete times that work, or share a scheduling link if one is configured.
Calendar meeting-prep briefs
Runs automatically, once daily, for every tenant with Gmail connected — no separate opt-in and no separate “Connect Calendar” step. Calendar access (calendar.readonly) is part of the same consent screen you already granted
when connecting Gmail, so
if Gmail is connected, this is already live.
Each day, Helium checks your calendar for today’s real, non-cancelled,
timed meetings, and matches each attendee’s email address against investors
you’ve actually started an outreach sequence with (active or past) —
this is the only reliable source Helium has for a real investor email
address, so a meeting only gets a brief if you’ve previously emailed that
person through a Helium sequence. A meeting with no matching attendee is
skipped entirely; Helium never generates a brief for an unrelated meeting.
When a meeting matches, Helium looks up the fund/company (the same research
logic enrich_investor uses) and posts a brief to the same Slack channel the
original sequence used. It skips the company lookup for personal email
domains (Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, and similar) unless it also has a fund name
on file for that contact — and says so plainly rather than guessing from a
domain that can’t tell you anything:
📅 Meeting prep: Intro call with Jane VC <jane@examplevc.com> at 2:00 PM Your history: an active outreach sequence — 2 touches sent, last on 2026-07-20. Example Ventures · Fintech, Developer Tools · 40 employees on LinkedIn · examplevc.com Early-stage fund investing in vertical SaaS and fintech infrastructure. [Open in Calendar]If no fund/company match is found, that section reads “No fund/company match found for this contact — nothing fabricated here, just no research to show.” instead of being silently omitted or guessed at.
Lookalike investor discovery
This one has two halves — an on-demand tool you call yourself, and a free weekly monitoring loop that runs the same underlying research automatically. On-demand (find_lookalike_investors, 35 credits/call): researches who
funded one or more competitor/adjacent companies and surfaces those funders
as new candidate investors, tagged “lookalike via .” Call it from
Slack, REST (POST /v1/fundraising/find-lookalike-investors), or MCP.
company_names is optional — omit it and Helium falls back to your stored
profile’s known_competitors (startup_equity profiles only). Either way,
it’s capped at 3 companies per call. Newly-found investors are added to your
stored investor list; already-known ones are refreshed.
Weekly monitoring (free): runs the identical lookup automatically once a
week against your profile’s known_competitors, with no per-call charge.
To turn it on, set two fields on your fundraising profile:
known_competitors— a non-empty list of competitor/adjacent company names (startup_equityprofiles only — afund_lpprofile has no competitors to look funders up for)lookalike_monitoring_opt_in: true
set_fundraising_profile call — or set them explicitly and reliably
via PUT /v1/fundraising/profile. Either way, missing either field means
the weekly check skips your account silently — this is opt-in, so not
opting in is the expected default, not an error. Ask “what’s my fundraising
profile?” afterward to confirm both fields actually got set before you
count on the weekly digest showing up.
Once opted in, Helium posts a Slack DM (not a channel message) to
whoever installed the app, and only when it finds at least one genuinely
new fund — a repeat week against an unchanged competitor list simply
re-finds the same funds and posts nothing:
🔎 Found 2 new funds that look like your best-fit investors Based on who funded: Ramp, Mercury • Example Ventures — Tier A, score 78 (via Ramp) • Northside Capital — Tier B, score 61 (via Mercury)
LinkedIn engagement monitoring
Runs automatically once daily, but only for a profile that has opted in.founder_linkedin_url and company_linkedin_url have existed as profile
fields since early on — if you already set one expecting monitoring to
happen, it wasn’t live until now; setting them alone still isn’t enough on
its own. Two things need to be true, and they apply the same way to a
startup_equity or fund_lp profile:
- At least one of
founder_linkedin_urlorcompany_linkedin_urlset monitoring_opt_in: true— a separate flag from lookalike monitoring’slookalike_monitoring_opt_in, since the two features have different prerequisites and run on different schedules
PUT /v1/fundraising/profile.
Once opted in, each daily run checks your (and/or your company page’s) most
recent posts from the last 7 days — up to 5 posts combined across both
profiles — and pulls the reactions and comments on each (up to 20 distinct
people screened per run). Dedup is per (post, engager) pair, not per
person: once someone has been screened against a specific post, that exact
pair is never re-checked, but the same person engaging with a different
post in a later run is screened again — relevant here because the same
post can stay inside the rolling 7-day window across several daily runs.
Each engager is screened against your
actual stored profile — sector, stage, geography — to judge whether they
look investor-shaped, using the same dynamic judgment Helium’s other
screening uses rather than a fixed title/keyword list. Genuine investor-shaped
engagers are scored and added to your stored investor list, tagged with
which post they engaged on.
A Slack DM digest goes out only when at least one new investor-grade
engager is found that run:
🔎 3 investors engaged with your LinkedIn posts this week Checked 4 recent posts. • Sam Rivera — Tier B, score 58 (via their post engagement) — Commented asking about the seed round; general partner at an early-stage fund per their profile.This is entirely free — there’s no billed endpoint behind it, on-demand or otherwise.