Raising a Seed Round
In early 2025, I started a new company called applied37. I roped in talented friends, and together we began experimenting. By late February, we realized that the window to start a generational company would soon close, so we dropped out.
A week after this decision, we began our fundraising process and closed our $X.XM seed round within ~4 days.
I came into this process naively. We had a mediocre MVP, no prepared verbal pitch or slide deck, and only a shallow understanding of the misaligned incentives across the different stakeholders in the system. Things worked out largely because I was fortunate to have experienced people guide us through the woods. Coming out the other side, I wanted to write down the lessons I learned so that other founders going through their first real seed fundraising process can walk in a little less blind than I did.
Grant these thoughts no more than a grain of salt, as there are always several layers of nuance that can be added upon any heuristic.
Beginning "Process"
"Process" is startup terminology for talking to a bunch of VCs at the same time. The ideal way to start this process is to have at least 1-2 super connectors who are willing to send intros en masse. A great super connector for this purpose is someone who is well-respected, well-connected, and understands the fundraising process well.
Not all intros will convert, since the opposing side needs to accept the introduction. This begs the question: What does the ideal intro email consist of? It all boils down to urgency. Each intro email should get across the fact that your round is hot. In our situation, we had a few VCs preempt with offers prior to the round. Although we didn't manufacture this purposely, it worked since we were able to mention within our intro emails that our round was moving fast, and that we already had offers. So, almost everyone we were introduced to was very excited to try their hand at getting into the round.
Finally, remember that who you speak with at each firm matters immensely. For every firm, try to get an introduction to someone who you believe could understand your vision and has a strong track record of pushing companies through with founder profiles similar to yours. Different partners carry different levels of gravitas within their own firms, and in many cases, it will be your partner’s job to convince everyone else that you’re someone worth betting on. That choice also matters long after the round closes. The gap in helpfulness between partners within the same firm can be massive.
The process
Speed
Time kills all deals. People kept telling me this in the beginning, although I failed to fully internalize this until afterwards. The VC world is remarkably small. So, if executed properly, word of your fundraising will spread rapidly. Conviction tends to be borrowed, so you are likely to begin receiving an overwhelming amount of inbound interest. I suggest ignoring the folks with whom you cannot see yourself working alongside, as you simply cannot speak to everyone. If your company remains on the market too long, VCs will lose interest. If VCs pass on your company, word will spread and thus devalue your company in the eyes of others. Additionally, if a VC knows your round is moving quickly, they'll prioritize you and abridge their diligence process.
The Pitch
Again, we had neither a deck nor a prepared pitch. At the pre-seed or seed stage, almost nothing matters beyond the leader’s ability to articulate ideas clearly and tell a compelling story. The best CEOs are, without exception, excellent sophists.
You should remove your co-founders from the fundraising process as much as possible. If a VC explicitly asks to meet the team, do it—but treat that as the exception, not the default. Even deeply aligned teams will naturally describe the same idea differently, and that variance is costly. It confuses listeners and can subtly signal a lack of clarity or conviction. A single, coherent narrative matters more than demonstrating team depth, and it’s far easier to maintain when one person is doing the talking.
Creating a deck is an enormous time sink. Don’t build one unless you’re convinced it materially improves your ability to tell the story. Format matters far less than substance. Your pitch should rest on clean first-principles reasoning that’s easy to follow and hard to poke holes in. Take care not to come across as a salesman. Be genuine. Several VCs who made us offers mentioned that it didn't "feel" like they were being pitched—although perhaps that's because I took 80% of first Zoom calls from a hotel bed. Who knows.
Incentives
If your fundraising process becomes “hot,” VCs will eventually start pitching you in an attempt to win you over. Between tier-1 and tier-2 multistage funds and top-tier seed funds, the surface-level value propositions are often surprisingly similar. Multistage funds offer long-term partnerships, strong signaling to future investors, customers, and talent, and access to broad, institutional networks. The tradeoff is that they are structurally incentivized to secure meaningful ownership early so they can preserve leverage in later rounds.
Seed-stage funds, by contrast, make their money by identifying promising companies early and helping them win the Series A. They are far more aligned with you on near-term outcomes and are often more aggressive about helping you shape the next round. The uncomfortable part here is signaling risk: if you take seed capital from a multistage firm and they don’t lead your Series A, other investors in Silicon Valley may quietly assume something went wrong. Fair or not, this dynamic is very real.
There are only so many "types" of value a firm can give you. Some emphasize platform support, others brand, others recruiting. You should treat all of this as marketing.
Some great founders simply want a VC who wires money and stays out of the way. That’s a rational choice. My team, however, is young and inexperienced, and we're building enterprise software. I wanted a partner who had repeatedly seen companies scale from 0 → 1—and who could help us avoid obvious, expensive mistakes. I also wanted a firm whose credibility we could effectively "rent" to get in the door with customers and recruits who would otherwise ignore us.
I only started thinking seriously about these tradeoffs midway through the process. That was a mistake. You should decide what you actually want from an investor before you start fundraising, and then design the entire process to optimize for that outcome.
Ending process
Once you’ve shaken hands with a lead, slow everything down. Do not formally decline other offers until contracts are signed and the money is actually in your bank account. Until then, nothing is real. When you do turn people down, phone calls are the most respectable way to do it. This is a small ecosystem, and reputation compounds quite fast. You should generally avoid letting multistage funds “participate” in a round if they typically lead. In practice, they won’t help you. What they’re buying is information rights and optionality. The rest of your checks should come from follow-on seed funds and angels. Choose these wisely as well, as every .1% matters.
Miscellaneous
Round Size and Valuation: Raise as much as you actually need. Only you have real visibility into your company’s telemetry. Seed-stage funds will often push you to raise less at a lower valuation—this is rational for them. Multistage funds generally won’t care, because ownership matters more than price to them at this stage.
Remember that capital is an accelerant. It lets you move faster, but it also amplifies mistakes. If you’re wrong, you’ll end up wrong more expensively.
For a pre-seed or seed round, you should generally expect 10–20% dilution. If you’re well above it, you probably gave up leverage you didn’t need to.
When should you raise: Your seed round should be raised at the moment when not raising capital would actively harm the company. Until then, bootstrap. Constraints force clarity, and premature capital often papers over bad decisions. Intuitvely, later rounds will be different. If your company goes too long without raising a Series-N round, the market may start to assume something is wrong. Momentum is a signal, and in venture, signals a lot.
Surround Sound: Once you start fundraising, firms will quietly reach out to people in your network for references and context. We actually had a firm reach out to our high school science teacher. This cuts both ways. If a VC is dragging their feet, you can often “ping” them through this backchannel by letting their peers know you’re moving quickly. The ecosystem is smaller, and more gossipy, than it looks.
Follow Your Gut: After enough VC conversations, every pitch starts to blur together. Beyond basic diligence and founder references, trust your instincts. Choose the partner and firm that make you'd be excited to build a dominant company alongside. We ultimately chose our firm/partner largely because several trusted people in our network described them as having unusually high integrity and work ethic. That mattered to us more than anything else.
Sleep: Ensure that you are getting proper sleep during the process. I got little sleep, and this began to hinder my ability to have cogent discussions.
Leverage: You should assume that every part of the process is negotiable and act accordingly. Most founders accept defaults because they’re presented confidently, not because they’re fixed. Terms, timelines, check sizes, and even partner involvement may all move once you push back.