Organisational Intelligence for Early-Stage Ventures

Know where you stand before the room does.

EPIC Alliance brings structured, stage-calibrated assessment to the organisational dimensions of startup risk — the ones most correlated with failure, and assessed the least.

51
KPIs
Across 4 pillars
5
stages
Stage-calibrated
~40 min
Calibration
+ assessment
45%+
Non-financial
failures

Two AI agents. One discipline.

Hallucination-free by architectural design. Literature-anchored on stage-relevant academic sources. The first AI agents in venture intelligence that cannot fabricate a KPI, capitulate under pressure, or speculate beyond evidence.

Hallucination-free by design Literature-anchored Never speculates beyond evidence Streaming · Prompt caching
EPIC Coach AI

For founders. Developmental, not fatalistic.

Anchored in your live KPI data. Surfaces leverage, prescribes specific actions, frames stage-appropriate priorities. Never makes outcome promises.

  • Tool-use architecture — fetches data on demand, never injects static dumps
  • 6 leader-growth clusters · stage-aware priorities
  • Streaming responses · 3-7s opener
More about the Coach for founders →
Free for founders during Pioneer Period — until December 31, 2026.
EPIC Analyst AI

For investors and board members. Diagnostic, not predictive.

Reads the organisational signal — invisible risks, internal contradictions, behavioural patterns. Holds its position under pressure. Cites only the KPI evidence the data actually surfaces.

  • Tool-use architecture — KPI hallucination architecturally impossible
  • 7 investor behavioural clusters · 9 cross-KPI contradiction patterns
  • Anti-capitulation discipline — no sycophancy, no drift to prediction
More about the Analyst for investors →

Financial rigor. Organisational blindspot.

Venture capital applies rigorous quantitative models to financial risk. But when evaluating the organisational and leadership dimensions of a startup, the same investors rely almost entirely on unstructured methods — founder interviews, gut instinct, and collective impressions.

The evidence is clear: over 45% of early-stage failures are directly attributable to team dysfunction, leadership gaps, and premature scaling — not financial mismanagement. Yet these are precisely the risks that receive the least analytical rigor. EPIC Alliance closes this gap.

The EPIC Model

Four organisational dimensions, each empirically tied to a documented startup failure mode. Together they cover the full surface of non-financial risk in early-stage ventures.

Stage-calibrated across 5 maturity levels, from Pre-Seed to Scale.
E
E · Empower

Internal leadership capacity

Develop people, delegate effectively, build accountable cultures. Maps onto the wrong-team and disharmony failure modes.

P
P · Present

External credibility & communication

Communicate effectively with investors, partners, customers. The dimension most often underweighted by founder-centric assessments.

I
I · Innovate

Adaptive & creative capability

Intellectual depth, market signal integration, rapid prototyping. The capacity to update direction when reality demands it.

C
C · Commit

Execution & delivery culture

Translate strategic intention into operational execution: OKR discipline, decision-making, customer obsession.

Built on the post-mortem literature. Validated by use.

EPIC Compass synthesises the empirical literature on early-stage failure causation — meta-analysing post-mortem data on close to 4,000 startups across CB Insights, Startup Genome, Fractl, and peer-reviewed systematic reviews — into a single stage-calibrated diagnostic instrument.

~4,000
post-mortems

Theory-grounded on the failure literature

Synthesises CB Insights post-mortem analysis, Startup Genome longitudinal report, Fractl data, and Szathmári et al. (2024) systematic review on early-stage failure causation.
51
filtered KPIs

Stage-calibrated and academically anchored

Each KPI passed four selection criteria: empirical grounding, observational tractability, stage relevance, discriminative validity. Anchored against Hambrick & Mason, Greiner, Eisenhardt & Schoonhoven, Colombo & Grilli.
Pioneer Period

Founding Members shape the instrument

Each early administration contributes to the cohort distribution that drives the empirical refinement of future versions — the same trajectory that built the Gallup Q12 and FICO score from theoretical estimates into industry-standard tools.
The EPIC Compass working paper (32 pages, March 2026) documents the framework in full — theoretical foundations, KPI selection methodology, scoring architecture, validation strategy. Available to qualified partners on request.

Built for the ecosystem. By practitioners.

EPIC Alliance was founded on a single conviction: organisational risk is both measurable and systematically underassessed — and the failure to measure it has material consequences for investment outcomes.

"Venture capital applies rigorous models to the dimensions of risk easiest to measure, while accepting much higher uncertainty about the dimensions that matter most."

Co-founded by two ICF-certified practitioners with deep experience at the intersection of organisational leadership and early-stage finance. Based in Luxembourg, with the ambition to become the reference assessment standard across European business angel networks and accelerators.

The long-term vision: a living organisational score, continuously updated through data integrations and guided by intelligent coaching — the FICO score for founders.

Framework Summary

A 4-page overview of the EPIC framework — pillars, stage calibration principle, KPI selection methodology.

Download summary →

Full Working Paper

32-page academic working paper — empirical grounding, scoring architecture, validation strategy. Available to qualified partners.

Request the paper →

Get in touch

For partnership discussions, institutional licences, or any questions on the framework.

team@epic-alliance.io →

Know where you stand before the room does.

EPIC Compass takes about 40 minutes. Stage-calibrated, benchmarked against your cohort, structured for investor conversations.

Pioneer Period. Free for everyone until December 31, 2026 — founders, investors, and board members. Founding Members keep permanent benefits when standard plans launch on January 1, 2027.