Member-only story
BEST BUSINESS BLOGS
How to Run a Successful Series A Fundraising Process
2048 Ventures’ managing director explains the nuts and bolts of raising venture capital for your startup
Best Business Blogs is a Marker column that scours the web for the most interesting posts on business, entrepreneurship, and product development. This post by 2048 Ventures’ Alex Iskold originally appeared on his blog.
I’ve written many posts on my blog talking about how to raise a seed round.
The main characteristic of most seed rounds is that they are based on the strength of the founding team, and, a lot of times, the CEO’s ability to present a compelling vision of the future for investors.
While sometimes seed companies have traction, a lot of times they do not, and seed investors may be fine with that. Not so with most Series A investors.
In general, modern Series A rounds range from $5 million to $15 million and even north of that.
Series A is now much more like Series B in the old days, and investors are looking to invest in the absolute best companies — those that have strong growth and potential for even stronger growth.
On the flip side of this, the founders that are running these rocket ship companies do not want to spend six months raising capital because it takes their attention away from running the business.
To raise Series A relatively quickly and to have the optionality to choose an investor, in the end, is to leave nothing to chance.
In this post, we take a look at how to run a tight Series A process to help you get multiple competing term sheets, while not taking a lot of time.
To be clear, this strategy only works if you’ve got the growth, and a lot of growth potential to raise a proper Series A. This is NOT the right strategy if your business is not growing fast.
To raise Series A relatively quickly and to have the optionality to choose an investor, in the end, is to leave nothing to chance.
