I make Pre-Seed to Series B founders successfully fundraise by helping you build your fundraising operating system. | $350m+ raised with founders. | Follow me for tips on fundraising.

I have spent the last 10 years trying to find the "secret" sauce to making you fundraise for your company.

And you know what?

There's no secret. 

It’s just a matter of having: 

- The right preparation & processes
- A clear and concise narrative & storytelling
- Structured relationships built over a long period 

The real "secret", if there's any at all, is that you need to build a system around your fundraise to make sure you do the proper work.

A system means that allows you to: 

- Efficiently build the right relationships with investors and connectors
- Influence investors that YOU are a good bet
- Take them through your process in an efficient manner 

All the while keeping accountability of you doing the boring but important stuff.

During the $400m+ in venture funding I have been a part of, I was able to meet best-in-class  entrepreneurs. 

Some of these entrepreneurs have gone on to raise $100M+ in fundraising each. ​

All of them possessed operating systems for the fundraises. 

I’ve built such a system for fundraising founders. 

And I can help you build yours. 

But as with all things, getting started, maintaining consistency and keeping accountability is easier said than done.

The founders I have helped with their fundraises have gone on to raise $250M+. 

...And I'm doing all of this with a 100% MONEY-BACK GUARANTEE.

Now, are you serious about building fundraising for your startup? 

Let's make it happen.

(I CAN'T HELP YOU IF YOU HAVE ALREADY STARTED YOUR FUNDRAISE). 

👉🏼 Shoot me a DM, or head over to my featured section & check out our offer.

I'll see you at the top!

Gian Seehra

A paid “intro service” just cold-DM’d me… 


asking if I invest.

I don’t.

And a 10-second look at my profile makes that obvious.

You can see the message down below after I asked why they connected with me. 

This is why you should be careful paying for “VC intros”:

𝟭) 𝗧𝗵𝗲𝘆 𝗱𝗼𝗻’𝘁 𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝗮 𝗺𝗮𝗴𝗶𝗰 𝗹𝗶𝘀𝘁 𝗼𝗳 𝟱𝟬𝟬 𝗶𝗻𝘃𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗿𝘀

If they did, they wouldn’t be spraying DMs at random people.

𝟮) 𝗠𝗼𝘀𝘁 “𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗿𝗼𝘀” 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗷𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝗼𝘂𝘁𝗯𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱 𝘀𝗽𝗮𝗺 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗻𝗮𝗺𝗲 𝗮𝘁𝘁𝗮𝗰𝗵𝗲𝗱

You’re not getting "warm" relationships as much as they pretend. 

They will just spam you out in the hopes someone bites. 

𝟯) 𝗜𝘁 𝗰𝗮𝗻 𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲𝗹𝘆 𝗵𝘂𝗿𝘁 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗳𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗿𝗮𝗶𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗴

Investors can smell mass outreach instantly.

Even if you get a call they will think you are desperate and think less of you. 

-

Think about it:

Someone paid this firm to “open doors”…
…and they’re knocking on mine.

So if you’re raising, do this instead:

1. Build a clean target list (100+ funds)
2. Get real warm paths (operators, founders, experts)
3. Send thoughtful, specific outreach
4. Give more than you take 
5. Only then ask for potential intros 

Stop paying for “intros.”

Because they don't work. 

Instead, pay with effort. With work. 
Just like the top 1% of founders do.

What do you think of "paid for" intros? 

P.S. Some paid for intros actually can work btw, but ~5% of the people doing it are like that. And you have no way of knowing who is good or bad. Most are spamming like this!

Failed 2 fundraises. Then raised $16M. Now I teach founders everything I wish I’d known. | Ex-Octopus Ventures VC | $250M+ raised with founders | DM “RAISE” to chat

In 2018, I met a seed-stage company that I was excited about. 

The founders had: 

1. Previously built an app with 1 million users
2. Now building a high potential company 
3. Already hired amazing people  

I was hooked with the new company's vision. 

And believed that they had the potential to be truly game-changing. 

In fact, I still do... 

On paper, everything looked great. 

They were:

• Experienced founders
• Building a great product
• Targeting a large market
• And a track record of growth

But then it all came crumbling down. 

Why? 

Because we never actually met the CEO... 

3 meetings down and he kept saying he was too busy. 

How could we invest into a company when we hadn’t even met the leader? 

We decided not to waste our time and rejected the company in the end. 

This is why its so important to make sure its always the CEO conducting the first few meetings. 

Even if you think someone else may be better at telling the story.

♻️ Repost is you think this can be helpful to other founders

-- 
P.S. Wondering if pictures like below are useful or not. Yay or nay on them? 

#entrepreneurship #startups #venturecapital

A “3-week raise” is real. It just starts 3 months earlier.

Because the “fast raise” isn't something that just 𝗽𝗼𝗼𝗳𝘀 out of thin air...

What it usually looks like in the wild:

1. Over 3–6 months, the market starts leaning in.
2. Multiple "random" signals to investors. 
3. Experts telling them you are one to watch. 
4. Other founders mentioning you. 
5. VCs starting to keep you on track. 

Those investors are watching (even if you don’t realize).

They’ve seen enough cycles to know the pattern:

Great founders execute… repeatedly… over time.

So by the time you “start the raise,” you’re not having to introducing yourself.

But instead just giving them a moment to act. 

RIGHT NOW. 

That’s where speed comes from:

𝗙𝗮𝗺𝗶𝗹𝗶𝗮𝗿𝗶𝘁𝘆
You’ve been in their orbit long enough that they are starting to believe you can do it. 

𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗼𝗳 𝗼𝗳 𝗲𝘅𝗲𝗰𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻
They've seen you execute so well they know this is the last chance to invest. 

𝗣𝗿𝗲-𝗲𝗺𝗽𝘁 𝗽𝗿𝗲𝘀𝘀𝘂𝗿𝗲
A few investors don’t want to “wait and see” anymore, so they try to get in early.

Then one thing happens that changes everything:

A credible investor moves first.
A first term sheet (or a clear lead signal) hits the table.

And now the dynamic flips:

Now you're "hot" and everyone wants in. 

That’s how a "3-week raise" actually happens:

Not from waking up one day and “running a process.”

But from months (sometimes years) of compounding execution + investor awareness. 

Things you need to be spending every day doing. 

Now if you want to learn what the 5 mistakes every founder makes thats making them fail their fundraises. 

Comment "MISTAKE" and i'll send it over.

My friend had the perfect CV, yet still got zero jobs. 

And it was due to 1 simple reason: 

My friend had everything going for him: 

1. Incredible track record 
2. High-level roles 
3. Clear results

So he assumed getting a job would be easy.

But after 6–7 months of applying online, he had 𝘯𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨. 

He was burning time, burning savings, burning confidence. 

Why did this happen? 

Because he was applying 𝘤𝘰𝘭𝘥. 

His resume got buried with 200+ others. 
All trying to do the exact same thing. 

Yet when he decided to get respected people to introduce him to hiring managers... 

Everything changed! 

And he was hired within a month. 

Does that sound familiar to you? 

Because founders do the same thing in fundraising. 

You are: 

1. Cold emailing decks
2. Spamming on linkedin dms
3. Submitting through portals…

And wondering why you’re not getting real meetings.

The truth is because its very much like hiring. 

If you aren't leveraging someone else's social capital via warm intros.

Then your pitch deck gets put at the bottom of the pile. 

So don't be like every founder. 

It's not going to work.

How are you making sure you get enough investor meetings? 

P.S. Wanna learn how to get 100+ warm intros consistently in your funding round? Then DM me "NETWORK" and I'll send you more info.

Helping non-tech businesses build software products in 8-12 weeks | DM me your app ideas | Owner - Ionio |

Hi, I'm Rohan! I run Ionio — a strategic AI consultancy for Retail & Ecom SaaS. We help mid-market platforms ($5M-100M ARR) build AI features that reduce churn, justify premium pricing, and turn their product into something merchants can't live without.

Over the past 5 years, we built 40+ products and helped founders go from zero to seven figures multiple times. Same playbook, over and over: take an idea, ship it fast, make it work, scale it.

After doing that tens of times, we wanted to take everything we learned and bring that energy to companies at the next stage. That's how we ended up focused on mid-market Retail & Ecom SaaS.

I'm genuinely passionate about this space. Generative AI lets us do something that was never possible before: personalize every single customer interaction. Not segments. Not cohorts. Actual one-on-one conversations at scale. Retail and ecom is where that has the biggest impact.

I've been working in AI since 2016 — back when that meant computer vision, not ChatGPT. Smart cameras, facial recognition, number plate recognition. That foundation matters when you're building production systems that actually need to work.

Previously: From 18 to 20, Sr. Software Engineer at SmartCow (Deep Tech AI company in Malta). At 17, Python work for a Mumbai startup, who are YET to pay me. At 15, building websites and apps for family friends in Java. It's been over a decade.

I started Ionio as a college junior, from my parent's bedroom, while hiring someone to do my assignments & a chauffeur to take me to college. Now it's a little less grunge than that.

In another life: rapper, musician, and cinematographer. Now I just build AI for retail... :(

What our clients say:

"Working with Ionio felt like having an extension of my own team — professionals who genuinely cared about delivering results, not just collecting a check."
— Stefan Georgi, Founder, 9-figure ecom founder

"Fastest I've ever launched a polished product. From wireframes to +1000 paying users in <8 weeks."
— Brad Milne, CTO, SupplierHQ

"Ionio has the character to navigate challenges and the technical depth to turn our 'AI-first' vision into reality."
— Sallyann Della Casa, CEO, Gleac

Read 35+ case studies on our site.

I post about: AI strategy for retail, technical deep dives, and behind-the-scenes of building Ionio.

If you're leading product, engineering, or strategy at a Retail & Ecom SaaS company, or a founder in any space — DM me, I always reply. If you're in Mumbai, I'll buy you a coffee.

Rohan Sawant

Every week I get on a call with a CEO who spent a weekend on Lovable and now thinks his engineering team is lying about timelines

It always goes the same way. They find Lovable, Emergent, bolt.new or Replit Agent, mess around for 2 days and suddenly they have something that looks like a real product.

They screenshot it, show the engineering team on Monday and go “I did this in two days why the fuck are you telling me 5 months”

And honestly? The CEO is right to be pissed

Not about the Lovable prototype being production ready, it’s not. But about the speed. 

Any engineering team in 2026 still operating at pre-AI timelines is just doing something wrong. 

If they’re not shipping at least 3x faster than they were 2 years ago you need to have a hard conversation with your developers

The leading players in every category are already building at this speed. 

The problem is both sides are delusional. The CEO thinks the Lovable thing is the product. The engineering team thinks 5 months is still a reasonable timeline. Both are wrong

We show up to the second call with a working prototype before the contract is even signed. Then we throw it away. 

Its only job was getting everyone aligned in 3 days instead of 6 weeks of arguing about button placement

Then we rebuild it properly. Production grade. In 6-8 weeks and not 5 months

If that sounds fast it’s because it is. And if your team can’t do it that’s the conversation you actually need to be having

No alternative text description for this image

Nobody in B2B is competing on this one thing - “taste”

I’ve been looking at companies that have raised 50, 70, 100 million dollars and their landing pages feel like templates, their content is educational but forgettable and their product demos could belong to any of the hundred other tools in their category.

Then you look at the brands they’re trying to sell to, luxury D2C, premium ecommerce, companies that obsess over every pixel on their product page and the SaaS vendor pitching them can’t even get their own site to feel intentional.

What most founders miss is that when anyone can ship features in a weekend and the tech gap is shrinking by the month. 

A great product gets you in the room, but taste is what closes the deal.

When everyone is using the same models to write code, the same tools to ship faster and the same frameworks to build products, every app starts to look and feel like every other app. 

The UI feels generated, the experience feels generic and nothing has a point of view.

Taste is what defines your pricing, gets you into the premium segment of customers and increases your margins when everyone else is competing on features and discounts.

Nobody in B2B SaaS is competing on this. Everyone is racing to ship more AI features faster and the company that slows down enough to get the look and feel right will win deals they have no business winning.

PS: Pinak F. is on the 6th iteration of the UI just to get this right. That's the work nobody sees but everyone notices.

I can’t charge prices we charge I’m not confident the client will make money working with us. 

That’s our whole pricing philosophy. Projecting attributeable ROI. Working backwards.

I’ve had calls where I quote $$$ amount and someone says another agency quoted half, or a third.

I tell them... go with the other agency and i don’t argue. 

I don’t compare deliverables or explain why we’re different.

Because the only question that matters is whether I believe this project will actually generate big enough ROI at a low enough risk factor.

If we quote $$$ it’s ONLY because I see a path to making that client significantly more than what they’re paying us. 

Not in highlevel consultant theory but in specific mechanisms I can point to.

When there's conviction we have 0 hesitation asking for it. 

When I don’t have it I just procrastinate the proposal. Sometimes outright reject it.

Would rather walk away than take money from someone I’m not sure I can help.

This has cost us deals. It’s also the reason, we've won deals :)

Every week I get on a call with an ecom SaaS founder who just saw a competitor’s demo and is panicking.

“Have you seen this? They’ve built so much.” and I tell them the same thing every time.

That demo means LITERALLY nothing.

It now costs almost nothing to build a clean dashboard, record a walkthrough and make it look like a real product.

What used to take months and money can now be done in days. Which means most of the signals founders rely on are broken like - screenshots, product videos and polished websites.

Even when they’re real, they’re still far easier to ship than they were a year ago.

Non-technical founders are now shipping products that look indistinguishable from developer-built software.

And very soon, you won’t be able to tell the difference at all. So let’s be honest about what’s happening.

1️⃣ Software is no longer the advantage
If it can be built, it can be rebuilt. Faster, cheaper, by more people. AI hasn’t made you special. It has removed the barrier for everyone else.

2️⃣ Speed and building are now baseline
Entire products can be shipped in weeks. If you’re still “building from scratch”, you’re just burning time to feel productive.

3️⃣ Moats have shifted away from code
Your real moat is what customers can’t easily take with them:
Data, workflows, integrations, habits built over years

Because if your product can be rebuilt in 5 weeks… It’s not an advantage but a head start with an expiry date.

Curious to know how you’re thinking about moats in a world where software is becoming free?

"bae pls go to sleep you are not on linkedin anymore, it's 3am on saturday"
.
"Last week I got on a call with a SaaS CEO. Retail space. <$5M ARR. Sideways growth.

He told me they'd been planning an AI feature since December. Two months in, they JUST had wireframes and a Figma prototype. Bunch of screens that looked pretty in a presentation. Fake demos on the landing page.

His exact words: "We're probably ~5 months out from shipping something."

5 MONTHS. GPT-4.5 was 5-6 months ago. The entire landscape shifts in that window.

"This is not even 2 months of work," I told him.

2 days later, we took the call transcript and showed up to the next meeting with a clickable Lovable prototype of the same feature. The call after that, we'd started fleshing out actual React components — 20% of functionality done.

Here's how: Pinak F. sketched rough screens in Excalidraw — maybe 15 minutes — then recorded an audio walkthrough of what each screen should do. 

That audio got fed into Claude to generate component-level prompts. Those prompts went into Antigravity IDE, which generated the full UI. Then Cursor Claude polished everything into clean, production-ready React.

Total time from "here's what I want" to clickable prototype: half a day.

His designers spent weeks on wireframes that could've been a 5-minute sketch. His product team spent weeks in Figma building pixel-perfect mockups nobody outside the company ever saw. His engineers hadn't written a single line of code in 2 months of "planning."

Meanwhile his competitors — GenZ YC brollihaired founders — are turboramming and rebuilding his product brick by brick.

The month most teams spend going from idea to mockup? Now less than a week. The 4-6 months of dev after that? Closer to two. Timelines have 1/3rd-ed themselves.

You don't have to work with us. Work with anyone who understands this. 

But if your team is still running the wireframe, Figma, sprint planning, dev, QA pipeline for EVERY feature...

Do they not know these tools exist? Or do they know, and they're just not telling you? 

Godspeed.

The skills that made someone a “senior developer” five years ago are becoming a liability in client conversations.

I watched it happen on a call last month. Senior dev from another org, sharp guy, asking the right questions - asking about AWS infrastructure, backend stack, what programming language to use, QA processes, the PRD.

All the things you’re supposed to ask before you scope a project.

The prospect got annoyed by question 3.

And I chuckled - it’s not that the questions were bad. It’s that the questions don’t matter anymore. 

Now we can build the thing he was trying to scope faster than he can finish writing the PRD spec for it.

That’s the part nobody is talking about. We talk about AI replacing junior developers. We don’t talk about how it’s making senior developers’ instincts outdated.

The instinct to ask, plan, scope, architect, question - that was the whole job. That’s what made you senior. 

Your judgment about what to build and how.

Now the build takes a day. The judgment that matters isn’t technical anymore. 

It’s “what does this data turn the business into.”
And that’s a completely different skill. 

One that most technical people were never trained for and don’t know they’re missing.

taplio

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The Battle

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