This founder raised nearly $1m from investors

Hello fundraising founders!  

Today, I’m sharing two useful resources:  

1. An interview (and highlights) with a founder who just raised $800k.

2. A list of seed-stage raises complete with industry, age of startup, amount raised and who invested in them.

The first will provide you with actionable tips and advice to improve your chances of a successful raise. 

The second will help you understand how much startups in your industry are raising and which investors are actually opening their wallets right now.

Let’s do it.

Kashif’s fundraising journey

On this week’s episode of Nelson’s Podcast, CEO and cofounder Kashif Zaman graciously shared how he raised almost $1m from investors for his startup Uptok, which aims to rehumanise ecommerce by connecting customers to retailers using video. 

Listen to the full episode, or read five of my favourite highlights if you’re short on time:

1. You don’t have a deal until the money’s in the bank:

“So our cold outreach triggers a VC that is interested in investing $2 million, and they were very excited about us. We went through three or four meetings. We're already having discussions about how many people and who we're gonna bring and all that. At the end, when they did the voting internally…one of the guys didn't vote for us and so because they couldn't do it, at the last minute we got a call that ‘hey, it's not gonna work’. No indicator, no reasons in the meetings.”

2. Not getting investment can be a blessing in disguise:

“A year and a half later that [not getting investment] was also a great thing that happened to us, because I know what we would have done with that money that early…we would have burnt it on mom and pop shops on Shopify. And we would have bought media and blah, blah, blah. It was not the thing to do. It kind of saved us.” 

3. Don’t waste your time on no-name pitch competitions:

“Recruiters and vendors are creating these events and they're giving you a false perception of progress by having this pitch competition and giving feedback on your deck. I think it's gone too far and it has become a business by itself and it's wasting founders’ time. If they are taught to pursue their vision with the type of investor who is ideal for them and they go after that in a pragmatic way, they can bypass this noise of the three-minute pitch competition.” 

4. Keep it simple

“We have a simple pre-money YC safe. We raised on a pre-money safe - $5 million valuation and 20% discount. There's not much difference between a few hundred thousand dollars. There's not a huge difference if you're raising a £100k check, is it pre-money or post-money? Don't get hung up on that.” 

5. Don’t be afraid to walk away 

“I was raising our first round where an angel investor we spent a lot of time with, they negotiated hard and we backed out of that. And we had all sorts of feelings, feeling good that we drew the line and feeling really bad that we probably could have gotten this 300k check that we didn't get. All in all, later, we felt that we did the right thing. It was related to advisory shares in addition to investments. And the number of advisory shares they were looking for were a lot more than typical advisory shares are worth. So, you know, that was setting the tone of the relationship and we just thought that, you know, this may not work out down the road. We're very simple people. We don't want to go back and forth on negotiations too much and it becomes a very hard ball, you know, back and forth, which we don't need to do. So it was a good gut feeling.”

Listen to the rest of Kashif’s fundraising story here.

This week in fundraising

Here are a few startups who announced their raises this week:

CarbonFarm - Agritech - $2.6m
This French startup was founded 2 years ago and was funded by Racine2, Serena, Makesense, TechMind, Ponderosa Ventures, AgFunder, Climate Capital, and BPI France.

Credal.ai - AI - $4.8m
This American startup was founded 1 year ago and is funded by Spark Capital.

Boundless Rider - InsurTech - $4.25m
This American startup was founded 1 year ago and is funded by American Family Ventures, Assurity Life Insurance, and Belmont Capital.

Almouneer - Healthcare - $3.6m
This Egyptian startup was founded 6 years ago and is funded by Global Ventures, Proparco, Digital Africa, and Wrightwood Investments.

Agentio - Advertising - $4.3m
This American startup was founded 1 year ago and is funded by Craft Ventures, AlleyCorp, Antler, Protagonist, and Permanent Capital.

FERO Payments - Ecommerce - $3m
This Dutch startup was founded 1 year ago and is funded by Coatue, Volta Ventures, and Antler.

P0 Security - Cybersecurity - $5m
This American startup was founded 1 year ago and is funded by Lightspeed Venture Partners, and SV Angel.

Treads - Automotive - $4.6m
This American startup was founded 4 years ago and is funded by Mucker Capital, Kickstart Seed Fund, Peak Ventures, Royal Street Ventures, and Convoi Ventures.

If you’d like access to a spreadsheet with another 60 startups that announced their raise in the last month, just follow the steps below to refer a friend to this newsletter.

I’ll be adding to it each week and sharing a handful of them here.

Have a great weekend.

Nelson