Just Raised - Yurtle - ￡1.4m

"You never know whether the last offer of money you had will be the last offer of money for a long time so you always have to take money off the table when you're able to."? Antonio Ribeiro, Founder of Yurtle?

???Did you have a particular raise strategy? How did you go about finding and then contacting investors?

"We absolutely had a raise strategy. There were two realities we had to succumb to.?So the first strategy was to start having?conversations early.? We still hadn't broken even, despite being profitable?at a unit economic level, we're still recouping our initial start up investments. So that was a big consideration, start early enough so that when we need the cash we've got it.Another strategic viewpoint on it was; how can we time this around key commercial milestones so that we are?building on our negotiating power and enabling us to secure a stronger?valuation in what is a bit of a tricky market.The other thing we really wanted to do was validate and get credibility for our business. So we got an Insurtech investor, which was ?Insurtech Gateway as one of our co-lead investors. They basically are a strategic investor so far as we use their regulatory platform to basically trade compliantly under the FCA. So they essentially lend us their regulatory licensing and we are an appointed representative of theirs. That was really key and signalled to the insurance world that we mean business.Then on the social impact side, from an employee value proposition. I realised that our product is intrinsically linked,?motivated and driven by impressing a social impact on the lives of caregivers. So finding a social impact investor was also very important."

???What percentage split roughly were your introductions warm vs. cold??

"We spoke to about 78 different funds, two thirds were warm introductions, the other third was cold outreach. Fundamentally, most of the introductions were always started from our existing angel investors."

?? Let's?talk funnel metrics, was this tracked?

"We had a pretty detailed spreadsheet of who we were going to reach out to, who we reached out to, where we got to and the reasons why it didn't move forward. Top of the funnel was 78 funds, got to the due diligence stage with 9 and then?term sheets from 2 of them which were the 2 that co-led our investment.?Our hit rate was fairly low but not as bleak as some founders I've spoken to."

????What went well in the raise??

"Yeah, the fact that we were able to close the round, the fact that we were able to partner with VCs that spoke to the two halves of our business, like the mission statement as well as into the business model, that went particularly well.We were introduced to a variety of different VCs who could be part of our funding journey further down the line, so that was really important as well.We met lots of VCs at different stages like Series A, which would be our next step. So those would probably be the main things that went?particularly well with the raise. I think our PR announcement also went well and?we managed to make a lot of noise in the?relevant spaces.

????What went less well?

"It went right out to the wire, time-wise. If it would have been a month longer, we would have been in a tricky situation with cash flow or had to make some really difficult decisions. So that was particularly bad.Another pain point was (without giving too much detail), I probably ended up paying more in legal fees than I would have wanted to."

?? How did you find your investors??

"It was all via LinkedIn, we approached people who were writing publicly about topics that relate?to our space."

?? And finally, when do you expect to raise your next round?

"We do expect to raise again, looking like summer 2025"