DealForge autonomously sources, scores, and writes investment memos on venture deals. Stop manually hunting.
1,180+ deals tracked · 22 AI investment memos · Updated daily
Advice on pre-seed fundraising for robotics (I will not promote)
Hey everyone. My co-founder and I are building a robotics startup (logistics). I know that in this day and age, the current fundraising meta is "build first, get customers, then raise”, which totally makes sense. But, I do think that’s definitely better/easier for SaaS. With the scale of our robot, we unfortunately don’t have the funds to bootstrap or build this first. We’re looking to raise $1M–$2M to build out our pilot units and bring on a third engineer. We’re targeting apartment buildings and universities for our customers. So, I had a few questions in regards to pre-seed funding. 1. Would non-binding Letters of Intent from universities or apartment managers actually move the needle for VCs at pre-seed, or is that still considered weak validation? 2. We don’t have a deep network of warm intros. Any advice on cold pitching VCs in this field? Are warm intros the only way in for $1M+ rounds? Appreciate any insights from people who’ve navigated the hardware-heavy side of fundraising recently.
Heuristic score based on available signals. Funding: $1.0M, Source: reddit_startups.