A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:24:02 · Niklas Lindgren, Pablo Srugo
[00:24:02] S0: Early days, we didn't have a thousand interviews. We had kind of few, but they were very similar to each other and they were kind of from the same ICP, which was from large MEP consultancies. So we took a bet at the end of the day. Because we didn't have the resources to do a very big research on the industry and we definitely didn't have the time in order to map out the full industry and the full aspects of what should we build. We needed to get something out fast and we nailed those for the first one. [00:24:39] S2: You love this show. You don't want to miss the next episode. Why would you? So hit that follow button. Trust me, it's in your own best interest. And the other question then is, because you're going workflow by workflow. How do you think about getting somebody out of status quo? Oftentimes when you're replacing a platform that is so embedded and so old. The upside is it's easy for you to create a 10x better experience on some workflow like you did. Relatively easy, but it's hard for you to create enough of the features that they can actually say, okay, I'm going to get rid of this and I'm going to go into Endra. How did you kind of bridge that gap? [00:25:13] S0: We bridged it very easily through integrating natively with the legacy players. As Legora and Harvey integrate natively into Word, we did the exact same thing. So the user who works in Endra, whatever work is being done there is perfectly possible to just translate into these older platforms.
00:25:13 · Niklas Lindgren, Pablo Srugo
[00:25:13] S0: We bridged it very easily through integrating natively with the legacy players. As Legora and Harvey integrate natively into Word, we did the exact same thing. So the user who works in Endra, whatever work is being done there is perfectly possible to just translate into these older platforms. [00:25:33] S2: So it was never a replace, it was just add this on top. Like, hey, you're doing this thing, it's taking you X number hours. Do it in our system instead, and then you just integrate it back just like you used to. [00:25:41] S0: Exactly, exactly. So the end result they're getting is the same one as if they were to use us. The design team of fifty people, but you know, you can do it from one person and you can do it much faster, and you can do much better. [00:25:55] S2: Walk me through the fundraising history. How long did you bootstrap for? When did you raise the first money and how?
00:25:55 · Pablo Srugo, Niklas Lindgren
[00:25:55] S2: Walk me through the fundraising history. How long did you bootstrap for? When did you raise the first money and how? [00:26:02] S0: So me and Anton invested money at inception. So we needed some money to get off. We wanted to build a very strong brand. So that was the reason why me and Anton invested $300/$400K, something, in the sort of at inception. Then we used that cash for something like six months and then we were discussing internally, should we bootstrap this or should we go raise VC money. David, as I said before, was sort of, he wanted to bootstrap this and not go raise VC money. We were like, yeah, but you know, there could be a big upside doing so as well. We can probably accelerate a lot of the work that we do much faster and so we did. And we raised a pre seed in, I think that was in April or May. I don't remember really, of 2025, a bit over a year ago. Then we raised our pre seed with Nordskan, a Swedish fund and then we raised our seed, as you said, in December of 2025. So we raised a $4 million pre seed, $20 million seed, and then we raised our Series A here in June, of this year and that was a $50 million round. [00:27:17] S2: I mean, out of those, the one that really shines the most is the $20 million seed. A median seed is like $4 million. You're at this point still pre launch, I believe. How does that $20 million seed happen?
00:27:17 · Pablo Srugo, Niklas Lindgren
[00:27:17] S2: I mean, out of those, the one that really shines the most is the $20 million seed. A median seed is like $4 million. You're at this point still pre launch, I believe. How does that $20 million seed happen? [00:27:30] S0: That $20 million seed happens because we had a waitlist at the time and the global engineering industry started to really understand the work that we did. That somehow, the VC community somehow got that information and there was a lot of interest to go lead that seed round. And from our standpoint, we understood at the seed level that this is going to transform how we design buildings. It's just a matter of when. I think that also came to the minds of the venture capitalists of the world, that this is probably something extremely big and something extremely meaningful for a very large industry. And this is just the early days. [00:28:20] S2: Did that come inbound or did you do a process for that? [00:28:23] S0: No, no, no, we have never done a process. None of the rounds has been a process. [00:28:28] S2: Do you have a sense of what you've done in order to generate so much inbound from VCs?
00:28:28 · Pablo Srugo, Niklas Lindgren
[00:28:28] S2: Do you have a sense of what you've done in order to generate so much inbound from VCs? [00:28:33] S0: I have gotten that question many times and I don't really have a really good answer to it. We have never focused on that. They just happen naturally, very naturally to us. I think it's a mix of this founding team, the very large opportunity in this industry, the fact that we are still the only player in this space. Meaning that there is some extremely large market to capture. We're first, and we are obviously, for that reason as well, the best funded and it's a market that not a lot of people are thinking about exists. So I think that has been a mix of the actual team, the founding team and the early team that we hired. The market size, the opportunity, the sort of how this industry works, and as well, what our customers are saying. Our seed investor, Notion, they said that they had never had so good customer interviews as they had once they did the homework on us and I think they did twenty or thirty user interviews. And then they did a lot of homework as well, because obviously a $20 million round in seed that's, you know, from by the way. From like a $300 million fund. [00:29:47] S2: Wow! That's a bet, yeah, yeah, OK. [00:29:49] S0: The partner there, Cam, I know when he wrote to his IC. Because I've seen the screenshot of it, he said that if there is one company that I will bet my whole career on. That this is, this is probably. [00:30:00] S2: He effectively is, right? [00:30:01] S0: Yeah, so. [00:30:02] S2: That's a good bet.
00:30:02 · Pablo Srugo, Niklas Lindgren
[00:30:02] S2: That's a good bet. [00:30:03] S0: But yeah, it was a good bet, right? So, he's thinking, I hope he's happy. [00:30:06] S2: Maybe two follow up questions on that. The first one is, you seem to find a massive space, right? This speaks to what you were saying, $20 million seed. Because of how big the impact could be and this is the thing that drives most VCs. At the end of the day is massive, massive markets. Most of them though are competitive, right? You look at law and you look at Harvey and Legora, I mean, and these are companies that have been around for several years at this point. You kind of come into it, you're the only player. You got there by serendipity, as one often does but looking back and thinking back. And imagine you're talking to a founder who's thinking about the next idea, do you have a sense of what it takes to find? It's one thing to find a niche space nobody touches, but then it's like, okay, you're in a tiny little space. To find a big problem that nobody's yet addressed, what kind of has to happen for that?