A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
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?
00:30:52 · Niklas Lindgren
[00:30:52] S0: I think it's hard to just, you know, find something. I think you sort of need to be curious. You need to sort of dip your toe into something because then you can understand sort of how that relates to something else. So looking back at myself, we started in the security industry. which is, you know, part of the construction industry at some point. So we installed these systems inside buildings that were being built, inside data centers that were being built and so on. But we didn't do MAP, but that was also getting installed inside buildings. But the reason we did that, we understood that this is a big one and with them we wanted to do something more meaningful in this space. But I think it's hard to just fall into something, you need to dip your toe into something and then find another way around it. But that's probably part of why this is an interesting case, because not a lot of people have went into this market and understood that this is a gigantic opportunity to transform how we design buildings in the world. And that's like, if we solve that, that's obviously a gigantic outcome. But more on a high level, I think currently the market and many of the VCs of the world want to. They think all services industries that can turn into SaaS companies or AI companies is something that's very interesting and I think the wind is blowing in that direction. So if there's another founder out there listening, I think maybe that's something that you should find. Like. where is there a services industry anywhere in the world that's running on very old systems or is very labor heavy. What can you do there? I think that would be sort of a more of a higher level guidance.
00:32:29 · Pablo Srugo
[00:32:29] S2: I mean, I think the other thing, just to learn from your experience. Something that I've always believed is, I mean if you land on an idea that's massive, that's great. But if you don't, you know, look at your first company, right? Your first company was nothing, let's say, sexy and also nothing that was going to become a trillion dollar company, right? Even a multi billion dollar company, but it could become a big success and at least relative. And certainly relative to you as a first time founder in the 20s, right? So, part of it is, like you said, dip your toes, getting into something that is, for whatever reason, interesting to you. Where there's team market fit, regardless of whether it can become a unicorn. What that might imply for you, not just in that first company but moving forward, is hard to kind of predict up front. But as long as you get something out of it, it could be a win.