Startup School 6: Why raising VC investment is so hard (…for European, all-female, purpose-driven teams)
Over its three years, Kiteline raised nearly £370k in venture funding from a mix of institutional investors like Antler and SFC Capital Partners, and a number of (truly angelic) angel investors.
One of the main drivers of Kiteline’s demise was our inability to raise seed funding at the end of 2022. There were a myriad of reasons for this. Firstly, the investment market basically tanked in the summer of 2022, following all the warnings from Y-Combinator, Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture Partners and others. Despite having landed John Lewis as an anchor client, we did not raise a single pound. I’ve talked about this ferocious landscape in my post about Luck.
Only the strongest ventures (or those with long runways) survived. We weren’t strong enough at the time, as our product wasn’t right and we weren’t very close to finding Product-Market Fit. I believe we were a smart, driven, hard-working team and given the time and runway, we would’ve been able to pivot to something great. But given the lack of funding, we never got that chance.
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