A data room for startups,
as one page that shows who read it

The first meeting went well and the investor writes back: "can you send over the data room?" At seed that usually means a Google Drive folder thrown together that evening, with file names nobody reads and no idea who opened what. Two weeks later you still do not know which fund is doing diligence and which one is being polite.

This guide is the checklist of what goes in a startup data room, a template that turns it into one page with an index and the files behind it, the demo of a finished one, and the free options. Hostus is the option we put first, and the category matters: best if your data room is what most seed rounds need, an index investors read in five minutes, the documents behind one email gate, and the signal of who read which section. It is not an M&A virtual data room. DocSend, Papermark, a Notion template and a shared Drive folder are covered below, with what their sites said today.

What is a startup data room, and what is it not?

A startup data room is the set of documents an investor reads after a first meeting and before a term sheet: traction, financials, cap table, legal, team. At seed it is a dozen documents and one summary page, read by five to twenty people over a few weeks. The job is to answer diligence questions before they are asked, and to show you who is actually doing diligence.

It is not a virtual data room for M&A. Those (Datasite, Intralinks, or the Data Rooms plans Papermark lists) exist for hundreds of documents, per-file permissions, watermarking, download control and audit trails, because a buyer's lawyers are reading. A seed round rarely needs that. It needs an index investors can read in five minutes, the files behind it, a gate that tells you who opened it, and a way to see which section each investor read.

The data room for investors checklist

The list below is the data room checklist for a pre-seed or seed round. A Series A adds depth (audited or reviewed financials, a full customer list, security answers), not new sections. Each line is something an investor asks for after a first meeting; if it is not in the room, it comes back as an email.

• Company. The deck or a one-page overview, the round (amount, instrument, lead, close date), use of funds.
• Traction. Monthly revenue or MRR for the last 12 months, customers, churn, retention by cohort, the pipeline if you sell to businesses. Say where each number comes from.
• Financials. A trailing twelve month P&L summary, cash, monthly burn, runway with the arithmetic, and the model if you have one.
• Cap table. Fully diluted, before and after the round, with the option pool and every SAFE or note listed.
• Legal. Certificate of incorporation, bylaws, board consents, founder stock agreements, IP assignment from every founder and employee, prior SAFEs or notes, material contracts.
• Team. Founders, key hires, the hiring plan the round pays for.
• Product. A short demo video or screenshots, the roadmap for the next 12 months.
• FAQ. The questions you were asked in first meetings, answered once in writing.

Two rules make the checklist work. Keep the summary numbers on the page and the full documents behind it, because most investors read the summary and open two files. And date everything: a data room with no "last updated" line reads as stale the second week of a raise.

A data room template: one page with an index

The template is one HTML page. An index at the top links to seven sections, each a heading with an id: company, traction, financials, cap-table, legal, team, faq. The summary numbers sit on the page. The full documents are PDFs uploaded next to it and linked by relative path, so files/cap-table.pdf opens behind the same gate as the page.

With the Hostus connector on, this prompt writes the page from your notes, publishes it and gives you the link. It works the same in ChatGPT or Gemini if you download the file and drop it on Hostus.

Here are my notes for our seed data room (pasted below): what the company does, the round (amount, instrument, lead, close date), six months of traction numbers, a trailing twelve month P&L summary, cash and burn, the cap table before and after the round, the team, and the questions investors asked us in first meetings.

Write it as one data room page with an index at the top that links to these sections, each a heading with an id: company, traction, financials, cap-table, legal, team, faq. Keep every section short; the full documents are PDFs I will upload next to the page.

- company: what we do in two sentences, the round, use of funds, why now.
- traction: four KPI cards, one small SVG line chart of MRR drawn in the file (no chart library), and where the numbers come from.
- financials: a table with trailing twelve months and last month (revenue, gross margin, operating expenses, net burn, cash), and runway with the arithmetic shown.
- cap-table: a table of holders before and after the round, fully diluted, with the assumption stated.
- legal: a list of the documents below, each linking by relative path to files/<name>.pdf, with a tag for the ones shared only after an NDA.
- team: founders and key hires, two lines each.
- faq: the investor questions I pasted, as details/summary.

Use only the numbers I pasted. If one is missing, leave a visible placeholder instead of inventing it. Show "Last updated" with today's date at the top.

No external scripts except Google Fonts, no tracking, no backend, no localStorage, one HTML file, mobile first.

Publish it to Hostus and give me the link.

The page is born private. In the Hostus dashboard, upload the HTML and the PDFs together as a folder or a .zip (opened in your browser, never uploaded as a zip), with the PDFs in a files subfolder. Then switch the page to email-gated. Restrict the gate to the investors you are talking to, by address or by a fund's domain such as @lowfield.vc.

A data room example

Here is the demo: a seed data room for a fictional startup that sells inventory software to bike shops. The company does not exist and every number is illustrative. It has the seven sections of the template, an MRR chart drawn in SVG, a cap table before and after the round, and a legal list with two documents marked "After NDA".

Three things on it are not in a shared folder. The investor can ask the page a question ("what is the largest customer as a share of MRR?") and get the answer from the page, with the section cited, no account. They can reply on a section ("the runway math assumes both hires in January?") and it reaches you by email, in a thread only the two of you see. And the index is the first thing they see, not a list of 40 file names. The demo is public; in real use it would be email-gated with the PDFs uploaded next to it.

See which investor read which section

The gate asks for an email before the page opens. No account, no app. You see who typed which address and when, and a daily email digest names the people who opened your docs the day before. From there:

• Reading by section. Time per section, per investor, anchored to the page's headings. One partner read Traction and Cap table twice and never opened Team; another read only Company. The first one is doing diligence.
• Questions. Every question an investor asked the page is listed for you, with whether the page could answer it. The unanswered ones are what the FAQ section should say next week.
• Replies. Each conversation is private between that investor and you. Two partners at the same fund do not see each other's notes.

With the connector on, ask Claude "who opened the data room this week and what did they read": it reads the reading data, the questions and the replies, and can draft the follow-up. Use what you learn to decide whom to call, never as something to say to them.

Free data room options for startups

Hostus first, for the case this page is about: a seed data room that is one page with the files behind it, with a gate that names the reader and reading by section. Facts about the others were read on each vendor's own site on 7 November 2026; where a page did not load, this guide says so instead of quoting a number.

• Hostus. The data room is a page on your link: index, summary numbers, files next to it, all behind one email gate. You see who opened it and which section they read, investors can ask it questions, and you update it in place. Free plan: 20 documents, 2 MB in total. Paid: $9.99 a month or $49.99 a year, 200 MB, which is what a folder of PDFs needs.
• DocSend. Pick it if the other side expects DocSend, or your documents are PDFs and decks that stay that way. Its pricing page did not load for us today, so check it for plans and the trial; our reading is on the DocSend alternatives page.
• Papermark. Pick it if your documents are PDFs that stay PDFs and you want page-by-page analytics, or an open source tool. Its pricing page lists a Free plan with 50 documents, unlimited visitors and page-by-page analytics. Data rooms are a paid plan, from €99 a month billed yearly (€149 monthly) as the page showed us in euros, with NDA agreements, a dynamic watermark and a custom domain. More on the Papermark alternatives page.
• A Notion template. Pick it if your investors are happy with a public page and you do not need to know who read it. Notion's Free plan is $0, can publish a page to the web, includes basic page analytics ("a list of page viewers" and views over time) and takes file uploads up to 5 MB each. There is no email gate and nothing per section.
• A shared Google Drive folder. Pick it if the round is small and the investors already know you. Free, shared by link or only with named people, and you can stop viewers from downloading, printing and copying. Google's Activity dashboard shows view history only for Docs, Sheets and Slides owned by a work or school account, and an investor can hide their own view history; a PDF in the folder tells you nothing.

One page per round, updated in place

A raise runs for weeks and the numbers move under it. On Hostus you upload the new file to the same document, or tell Claude to update the same page, and every investor who has the link sees October's MRR instead of September's. Nothing to resend, and the last 20 versions stay in the document's history. A wrong figure spotted an hour after sending is fixed in place the same way.

Keep one page per round and put the round in the title, not the slug, because the slug is the link. Reading by section belongs to the document, not to a version, so a seed room and a Series A room are two pages, grouped in a folder.

Good to know before you switch

Hostus is not a virtual data room for M&A: there is no per-file watermark, no download control, no NDA click-through, no per-file permissions and no e-signature. Every file next to the page shares the page's gate, so documents you want behind an NDA stay out until it is signed. Reading by section measures the page, not the PDFs, and Ask answers from the page's text. The gate is by email, not by password, and it never verifies that the typed address belongs to the person; an allowlist of addresses or a fund's domain only limits what can be typed, and the link is the credential.

Files next to a page: up to 40, 25 MB each, and they count toward your account's storage, 2 MB on free and 200 MB on paid. Reader questions are 20 a day across your account on free, 200 on paid. Pages carry a noindex meta and are not indexed by Google. There is no custom domain: the link is your-slug.hostus.page, and every page carries a small "Published with Hostus" pill.