Capital

Two things worth internalising before any of this.

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First: focus on customers, not investors. At the earliest stage, money almost never solves the actual problem. Paying customers do — and they also make the money easier to raise. Founders who spend six months fundraising with no revenue usually end up with neither.

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Second: an investor is buying an exit, not your company. They are typically looking for something on the order of a 10× return within three to five years: money in now, many times that back on a clear timeline. Every question they ask is a version of "how does that happen, and what stops it?" A pitch that does not answer it is answering a different question than the one being asked.

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The staged roadmap

Capital comes in stages tied to milestones, not in one lump at the end. Map yours before you talk to anyone.

Every founder should be able to talk through this table. Not with precise numbers — with the shape. If you cannot say roughly what you raise, for what, and what proves you are ready for the next one, you are not ready for the first one.

Two things founders get wrong here: assuming they dilute once at the end rather than at every round, and assuming the large number they have in mind arrives in a single event. Model it. The arithmetic is not intuitive and it should not be discovered inside a term sheet.

Look at how comparable companies in your sector were funded. How much, at what stage, how long it took, how much they gave up. This is public for many companies and it calibrates expectations better than any advice.

Non-dilutive money first

Grants do not take equity. If you are eligible for something, apply — a grant is strictly better than the same amount of equity capital, and winning one is itself a credibility signal to investors later.

How to find them. There is rarely a single clean database. The work is manual: find the ministry, department or agency programmes relevant to your sector; find their list of approved implementing agencies or incubators; then go through those organisations' own pages one by one to see which calls are actually open. An AI can pull the names and URLs, but somebody has to spend an afternoon checking which applications are live — the central lists are usually out of date.

Eligibility is often narrower than it looks. Many technology and innovation schemes are aimed at deep technology, science and hardware, and will not fund a consumer brand, a services business or a marketplace however good it is. Check the actual criteria before writing an application; a rejection at the final stage costs weeks.

Other non-dilutive sources worth listing: competitions and prizes, university programmes, accelerators with cash components, customer prepayments and deposits, purchase-order financing, revenue-based finance, and simply consulting or services revenue that funds the product.

What you are raising for

Use of funds

The two questions an investor asks about this table: "Why haven't you grown more with the traction you already have?" and "Exactly how does this money change the trajectory?" Have both answers before the meeting.

The exit

[TBD]

Uncomfortable and unavoidable. Who realistically buys this company, or how else does an investor get their money out? Name actual acquirers — the larger player in your category, the international group entering your market, the strategic buyer who needs your capability — or say honestly that you are building for cash flow rather than an exit, which is a legitimate business and a reason some investors will pass. Both are better than no answer.

The pitch deck

Structure. Use the order investors are used to seeing — most commonly the Sequoia-style sequence, which the majority of funded decks follow. They fund what looks like what they have funded before; matching the expected shape removes friction for free.

Length. Seven to twelve core slides, everything else in an appendix. A reviewer gives your deck sixty seconds on the first pass. If the story is not clear by then, the depth in slide fourteen never gets read.

Appendix: detailed financials, full competitive grid, technical architecture, research depth, pilot plan, regulatory position, references, letters of intent.

If you are applying to a specific programme

Add slide 2 as an explicit eligibility and fit slide that maps your application point by point to the programme's stated evaluation criteria. It feels redundant. It is not — a reviewer working through fifty applications against a rubric will thank you, and yours is the one that is easy to score.

Deck craft

• Maximise readability. Text that fits on a slide at a comfortable size, consistent sizing throughout. A dense slide read on a phone or across a room is a slide that did not communicate. This is the most common fixable problem in early decks.
• No generic AI-generated hero images. Reviewers see hundreds. Show the actual product, a real screen, a real photograph of the work being done.
• Every number sourced. Assume the reader will check one, and assume it will be the one you were least sure about.
• Credibility markers early. Years of work, number of customers or interviews, partners, pilots, filings, named advisors. Concrete counts, not adjectives.
• Read teardowns of funded decks in your sector. They are widely published, and an hour spent on them is worth more than a week of redesigning your own.

Current deck: [TBD — location, version, date] · Branding from 09-brand

Investor pipeline

Fundraising is an outreach process with the same structure as sales. Same discipline as the list of 100 in 05-gtm.

Where the CRM lives: [TBD]

Building the pipeline

Thirty minutes a day, consistently, beats a two-week sprint. Work outward from one known name: find an investor active in your space, look at who else is connected to them, follow the trail through funds, angel networks and syndicates. Every name found goes into the sheet with the date of first contact.

Connection notes should be short — a line or two. Who you are, the one-line company, one credibility marker, one specific ask.

Timing matters. Only approach an investor when your house is in order — entity clean, cap table sensible, data room assembled, numbers consistent. A reviewer's job is to find the reason to say no, and a small avoidable inconsistency is a free one. Early, exploratory conversations are fine and useful — just frame them honestly as relationship-building rather than an open round.

People to be careful of

Some intermediaries take a success fee to "help you find investment" while having no capital of their own. That model is not automatically illegitimate, but it is frequently a way to attach a percentage to work you could do yourself.

Signals worth checking before you engage: a real portfolio you can verify, a substantive public presence, people who will speak to you, and named investments you can confirm independently. Absence of all four is a reason to slow down.

Data room

Assemble before you need it. A founder who can send a complete, well-organised folder within an hour of a request looks materially more credible than one who takes a week.

Where it lives: [TBD]

Sensitivity: this folder is restricted by default. Share by named permission, log who has access, and revoke when a process ends.

History

Record the passes and the reasons. Three investors declining for the same reason is your most valuable free feedback, and it is usually about something you can fix.

Also record the offers you turned down and why. A term sheet declined because the money came without the right partner is a decision worth being able to explain later — and worth being able to reconsider deliberately rather than by drift.