You had a great business idea, you have tested it and found paying customers, and your next step is to find funding to grow beyond your sales revenue. Where will you find this money? What is pre-seed financing? At what point is your business ready for venture capital? How do you find investors?

Build my business activity: Use the startuprunway.io to figure out how much funding you need 

This session will cover the foundations of Startup Funding. You will get to understand what the different stages are, where you should look for funding at each stage and the reality of fundraising. You will also learn to create financial projections to present to potential funders. This is critical to your fundraising journey, because those that give you funding will want to know when and how they will get their return on investment. You also need to know how much you need to raise, how much you need to grow and when you will run out of money. 

Derrick Muturi is the Founder & CEO of Herdy. When it comes to fundraising, he has seen it all – raising money from friends, family and fools, crowdfunding for a flight to join an accelerator, credit from banks and of course, raising investment from venture capital. 

Preparation

Please sign up for an account at https://startuprunway.io/, which is the tool we will use for the exercise in the session. You can use your LinkedIn login to speed up the signup process, but it is not required. 

Here is a link to the power point presentation used during the webinar.

Additional Resources

How to Raise Money: The Realities of Funding – This discussion covered how startup funding works, what founders need to do before trying to raise funding and the different funding options that are out there. The panelists also shared tips on the pitfalls to avoid, what investors are looking for and how equity works. This video is courtesy of Future Females.