NimritaVC
We help build the future
Our Story
We are a team of ex-founders with decades of operating experience across the UK. We incubate student led/first time founder led startups from the most under-represented and socio-economically challenged parts of the UK. We support all industries at Pre-sees and Seed. We favour the most novel and disruptive start-ups, the crazier and altruistic the better.
HOW TO RAISE MONEY FOR YOUR STARTUP
In academia and the corporate working world it is necessary to graduate all stages of education and seniority to reach the top. Startup funding is no different, you must graduate each level in order to build the necessary pedigree to progress. Each preceding level should mature you, your business, your metrics, and your network to the minimum requirements necessary to secure the next stage. Below is the fool proof way to graduate your venture through start-up finance. Good Luck.
PERSONAL CREDIT AND LOANS
Before anyone else believes in your start you must believe in your start. The best was for us to know you hold this belief, is for you to have "skin in the game." If your founding team doesn't have all the skills to build your product, then it is expected that you have spent your own savings or taken out lines of credit to get yourself in position where you can create a super simple version of your product. The product should be built in such a way that one single client or a single pound/dollar is able to run through the chasis of your business. It would interest you to know that when Steve Job unveiled the iPhone to millions, it didnt actually work. He was switching half functioning phones and displaying pre-recorded walkthroughs without anyone noticing. Food for thought.
FRIENDS, FAMILY AND FOOLS
Once you have spent 70 percent of you net worth and lines of available credit, its time to leverage the progress you have made to convince your friends and family to financially support you on your mission. It's best for them to approach any money they give you as burnt with no likelihood it will be returned. At this stage you will either be successful and you can sleep at night knowing there are people who have pledged their ultimate belief and support in you (money.) Or you'll be awake at night knowing that those closest to you dont believe in you - and you will be given the much needed, powerful and useful wake up call that nobody cares about you or your business and it is only you can make this happen - so get to work and become more competent and diligent (all founders realise this at some stage.)
PRE-ACCELERATORS
By this point you should have a minimum viable product and a decent amount of customers relative to your industry/competitors. But most importantly you have built a strong enough team with enough skills to take your startup to market and enough to carry you to ten thousand pounds/dollars of monthly reoccurring revenue. These element should be enough to get you on to pre-accelerator. These programmes will help hone your vision, tell you thing that you didnt know, that you didnt know. Whilst there are not a lot of these programmes, they have a low barrier to entry and tend to pick startups from these programmes for their later stages accelerators. Be sure to turn up, be engaging and put across the best image of your company. Virgin Step up programme, TechStars Pre Accelerator.
ACCELERATORS
There are many Accelerators out there. Some offer investment, some dont. But all are likely to have a vast network of advisors, angel investors and ex-founders specific to the industry you operate in, to help get you to market. At this stage the emphasis is always on the founding team and if you have the diligence to succeed in general. These are often 3-6 month long programmes. Look for YCombinator, Techstars and SeedCamp.
EVENTS
Wether you make it on to an Accelerator or not now it is time to start meeting people, although this should always have been happening. Go to start-up events meet investors, founders and advisors. Never ask for anything on the first meeting. Connect, be interesting and intriguing enough to connect with people. Build a network monitoring infrastructure in Hubspot and Notion. Do this now, do not over estimate your ability to raise. You will likely need to speak to 1000 people to raise from 100 people. And those that do invest will do so over 6 months and 10 meetings. Trust us be organised now. Use Eventbrite, Meetup, Google searching and events listed directly on Venture capital firms website to find events. Look up, Entrepreneurs Collective, Ideasfest, London Startup Scene, Startup and Entrepreneurs Social.
Legals
In preparation for the next stage you need to get a few things in order to make you startup an attractive raise. You need to register your start-up on companies house and then apply to register you company under the SEIS scheme - check out Seed legals. Next in order to be able to expand your pool of potential angel investor wide enough, it would be useful to domicile you company in the USA too. This can be done very easily by way of Delaware C-corp using Doola.com. Finally if you are successful enough at the next stage you'll need to read up on SPV's, special purpose vehicles as a way to execute the raise operationally, for future ease and cap table cleanliness.
ANGEL INVESTORS
Angel investors are wealthy people, or exited founders who have enough money to pay their success forward. Their decision will of course be based on logic. But the reason why they decide to invest will be really because they like you or your business/mission and want to help; don't be foolish enough to think them taking the huge risk in you is an effort for them to make money. If they wanted to make money they would give their money to a VC fund like us who would invest their funds for them. You can find angel investors on NFX Signal, Angel Network, OpenVC, Crunchbase, Tech Nation (exited founders.). The same networking cadence applies.
VENTURE CAPITAL SCHOOL
Before you take the huge step to engage VC's you should know that there is a lot for you to learn before you engage do. We recommend you take the following online courses. YC Angel Investing School, Antler Startup Academy, Techstars Entrepreneurs Toolkit and Front Row Ventures VC Blueprint.
VENTURE CAPITAL FIRMS
We only invest in the top one percent of the top one percent of firms. The likelihood of you raising is slim if you haven't graduated the previous stages. The previous stages should have transformed into success in user, customer and revenue growth. You will not be considered by VC's if it is not plausible that you company could be valued at 100 million dollars within 7 years. An no matter what VC's say...they will never invest in a solo-founder unless you are the ex-CSUITE of the competitor you are building against, have immense traction or have exited at 10 million dollars with a startup before.
Contact
71-75 Shelton Street,
Covent Garden, London,
England, WC2H 9JQ
Email: if you don't already have our email. we will contact you.
