Spotlight
The Pitchdrive Philosophy
Written by
Thomas Wilkinson
Published on
October 30, 2019
Written by
Published on
Pitchdrive is your ultimate source to get qualified funding in the fastest way possible. Scale your early-stage startup faster!
Like many startups, Pitchdrive was born out of personal frustration. After being involved on both sides of the table while raising rounds the old fashioned way, our team was drawn together and united through a common goal:
There must be a simpler, faster and fairer way to do early stage startup fundraising.
The process of actually getting investment into early stage startups is often surprisingly long and painful to people who haven’t gone and done it yet. I’ve often said raising investment is 50% legal, 50% maths and 50% psychology, so in the midst of this complex dance it’s refreshing to take a step back and remind ourselves of the simple equation at the core of it all:
Our entire mission is built around uniting these two groups, removing absolutely all the friction and making rounds happen in the simplest, fastest and fairest way.
Because when investment rounds are done right, it’s an absolute win-win.
The most meaningful missions are usually easy to understand but hard to achieve, what we are trying to do is no different. The funding world is full of entrenched market practices & preconceptions, and at the end of the day we’re dealing with large amounts of money changing hands.
To serve as our guide we created three main pillars that we build our relationship with each startup upon:
Raising a funding round the old fashioned way takes way longer than it should do. From planning your round and designing pitch assets to investor sourcing, cold outreach, pitching, negotiating… re-pitching, re-negotiating, syndicate forming, hopefully not having to re-pitch and re-negotiate again, signing, notarising, money transfers… it’s not uncommon for founders to spend 9+ months dragging a deal over the line.
Driving this fundraising process forward is virtually a full time job for a founder. As an entrepreneur myself I want you to spend as little time as possible in ‘fundraising mode’ and get back to doing what you do best: talking to users and growing your startup.
From the moment you submit your Pitchdrive application, we aim to have your round completed within 30 days. It’s an aim we normally succeed with.
Trust on both sides is how we achieve this speed. When it comes to early stage fundraising, deals should not need to be formulated from scratch — it does not need to be this complicated.
We took industry best practices for founder and investor friendliness and then went beyond to develop standardised terms and contracts that are ideal for the vast majority of early stage rounds. We’re actually writing an entire series describing our approach to legalities — watch this space!
Whether we end up putting a startup live for funding or not, we designed our startup onboarding and evaluation process to be valuable to both sides.
We challenge things hard and don’t handhold when it comes to judging a startup’s strengths, but we also invest time to help our participating founders become successful fundraisers. In return, the feedback we get from startups helps us constantly improve.
The biggest challenge of fundraising is often knowing how to communicate your startup effectively to investors, especially considering their famously short attention span! We have advisory angel investors who form part of our evaluation process, so startups get the chance to actually work with real active angels to understand their feedback before going live.
This was just a quick glimpse into the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of Pitchdrive. If you’re involved in an early stage startup that could accelerate your growth through raising a funding round, or just want to learn more about what we’re doing, find us at Pitchdrive.com!
We're always looking for new partners and investment possibilities:
🌱 Pre-seed and seed stage (ticket size 200k-500k)
🏎 Highly product and scale driven
🇪🇺 European focussed
🕸 Industry agnostic
