He introduced his buyers to VCs instead of pitching them—then closed 20 deals in a row and a $20M Series A | Jonathan Awad, Co-Founder & CEO of Baselayer

How Baselayer won twenty straight deals by selling the founder

Baselayer sells business identity verification, and its route to product-market fit ran through the founder's relationships. Enterprise buyers take career risk when they pick a startup and are rarely paid more for it, so Awad sold himself. He introduced interested buyers to venture investors and answered every customer message within 20 minutes, which produced the 20-deal win streak he calls product-market fit.

Takeaways

• Twenty straight wins marked product-market fit. Awad opened HubSpot in early 2025 and saw that Baselayer had won its last 20 deals against every competitor, with none lost. That was about a year after going live in April 2024. Only one customer has churned.
• Early enterprise buyers are buying the founder. Awad says buyers are rarely paid more for choosing a startup and can get fired if it goes wrong. His hack was to ask whether they had thought about founding a company, then introduce them to VCs. He says it worked every time, across 40 tries.
• A 20-minute reply standard built customer trust. Baselayer answers customers on Slack and email within 20 minutes, a habit Awad carried from investment banking. A fast reply acknowledges a problem before it can be solved, and Pablo Srugo calls customer success the most controllable lever a founder has.
• Events and follow-up beat cold outreach. Awad skipped cold email for conferences and events, where he worked three or four market maps and messaged hundreds of people a day. He argues a 1% chance of usefulness is enough, and that people who seem irrelevant change jobs and become buyers later.
• Eight-figure revenue with twenty people. Baselayer reached eight figures in revenue with 20 people and now has 30. Awad credits co-founder and CTO Timothy Hyde and the engineering team with a durable, enterprise-ready product. One of the first 50 customers was FIS, a seven-figure deal.
• The idea came from a fraud-data consortium. Zoe Newman at Capital on Tap pointed Awad toward getting banks and payments companies to share fraud lists containing no personally identifiable information, because a business shut down at Brex can simply go to Ramp. Baselayer demoed Figma mock-ups it pretended were real.

How the Series A came together

1. Awad lined up 75 funds a month before the raise began.
2. SVB collapsed in the first week of meetings, and about 40% of weeks two and three were cancelled.
3. He had his first panic attack, and Anamitra of A4 Capital, whose own money sat in SVB and First Republic, agreed to lead the round anyway.
4. The process produced about $15m of interest and closed at about $4m after roughly 100 meetings in three weeks.