Rubato is a founder-led investor relations advisory. We embed with your finance team as an outsourced Head of IR — building the equity story, the investor book, and the internal machinery you will need the day you go public.
The problem
Most IR support arrives as a template and a checklist.
The standard model sends a senior name to the pitch and a junior associate to the work. You get cookie-cutter materials, a generic target list, and a deck that could belong to any company in your sector.
That model fails precisely where it matters most — in the eighteen months before an IPO, when the story is still being decided, the sell-side is forming its first opinion of you, and every disclosure becomes a precedent the company will live with for years.
Rubato’s solution
One senior operator, doing the actual work.
The client roster is small enough that every name on it gets real capacity. One person does the work — someone who has sat on the sell-side, run IR inside a $15B software company through its sale, and stood in the room for a restructuring the whole market was watching.
Nothing is farmed out, nothing is recycled from another engagement. The result is a step-function change in how the buy side and the analysts understand you.
What we do
Identify and open real dialogue with the sell-side analysts and crossover and institutional investors who should own you. Prep and staff management for conferences, non-deal roadshows, and 1:1s. Pressure-test the equity story until it survives contact with a skeptical portfolio manager.
Stand up a mock-earnings process before you ever need one. Draft the scripts and the Q&A. Build and maintain the investor tracker. Bring competitive and earnings intelligence to the finance team, and advise the CFO on which KPIs to disclose — and which to never start.
Banker bake-off, syndicate structure and economics. S-1 drafting liaison. Testing-the-waters targeting. Analyst Day materials and the guidance model. Exchange and listing advisory. And a critical-path checklist that tells you what has to be true, and by when.