The year is 2013. Henry Ward of Carta (then eShares) saw how painful it was each time investors asked for the latest cap table. Scrambling to update it in Excel became a massive fire drill. There had to be a better way.
Flash forward to 2024. Cap tables are clean (because of Carta) but metrics are a mess. Just think of the sprint companies go through to prepare for every board meeting, every quarter. At a minimum, the week before the board meeting, there are teams of people spending their entire week doing adhoc analysis. For earlier stage companies this happens more regularly, for their monthly update. There has to be a better way.
If I had a dollar for every time someone mentioned the parallels between us and Carta, well that might have been enough to cover our seed round ?? ! That's why it was so awesome to get to sit down with the Carta team and talk about our story.
What Carta did for the cap table, dataroomHQ is doing for operational metrics.
Thank you Carta, Kiley Roache, Zoran Basich, and Jessica Capibaribe for the feature. ?And thank you Oceans, Bling Capital, Cortical Ventures, Garuda Ventures, B5 Capital and others for supporting our mission.
2023 was not an easy time to raise, with seed round deal count down 27% year-over-year,?according to Carta data.
Defying the odds,?dataroomHQ, a platform that enables investors to evaluate companies, and companies to report and analyze their metrics,?announced a $3.5M round, led by?Oceans?and?Bling Capital, with?Garuda Ventures,?Cortical Ventures, and others joining the round.
Founder Jeff Schwartz shared insights into the company’s fundraising journey and how they navigated the current market conditions: https://lnkd.in/guDYq6R2
We cover:
? How a cold LinkedIn message led to an unanticipated term sheet
? Filling out a round when a fundraising opportunity surprises you?
? The decision to spend 1.5 years on R&D alone to build a “minimum remarkable product” and use that product to raise a round?
? Using a product demo as the ultimate pitch
Congrats to Jeff and the entire DataroomHQ team on your seed round! ??
