Growth Financing
Our early-stage and growth financing services draw on more than forty years of combined professional experience in starting, building and growing new businesses.
Our team members have been on both sides of the table, as entrepreneurs, fund managers and venture partners.
Our engagement process begins with high-tech startups that have completed their seed round. Although we welcome earlier contact and are always interested in talking with you and providing you with help and suggestions, we find that our skills are the best match for companies that are past their first seed investment.
Our process
Early Stage Financing
We start with discovery, in which we accurately assess your company’s readiness for the next financing round. Based on initial discovery results, we identify the path to departure: the steps required to start engaging with the right venture partners. These steps are based on your company’s financial requirements, product development and ongoing business requirements.
We also have a number of contacts at US-based incubators and accelerators, which can be very helpful in enabling you to test-drive new concepts outside the European market.
The pacing of the departure process is vital. We make sure it allows your management team to focus on the company’s continued growth, avoiding the extreme and negative disruption of the “drop everything to get financing” mentality. We also pace the process so your management team has sufficient time to put the results generated along the way into practice, such as changes to the business model, a new sales strategy or a shift in market segment.
We continue to guide you all the way through the transaction’s successful conclusion.
Growth financing
In general, companies ready for B-round or later financing have roughly a year of revenue to show for their efforts, with a strong management team and a proven product. At this stage, they are typically looking to facilitate growth in Europe, and possibly to target the North American or Asian market within a year or so.
Our international network includes venture funds that specifically target European companies looking to operate in either the US or Asia. These are highly valuable resources: they have an excellent understanding of the challenges a company faces when it opens up operations on another continent. Equally valuable is our familiarity with what these funds are looking for and the criteria they use when evaluating European investments.
As with early-stage financing, we begin with discovery to assess your company’s readiness for the next financing round, then identify the path to departure: the steps required to start engaging with the right venture partners. The pacing of the departure process is usually faster here, because companies in this phase already have products on the market and are typically driven by the need to rapidly expand and keep the competition from catching up.