We’ve just raised our Series A 🥳
Originally published on the Ledgy blog.
We’ve just raised our Series A led by Sequoia with the participation of Xavier Niel, Harry Stebbings, Visionaries Club, and several leading SaaS founders including UiPath’s Daniel Dines and Front’s Mathilde Collin. Our existing investors and early supporters Myke Näf, Paul Sevinç, btov Partners, Creathor Ventures and VI Partners participated as well.
Luciana Lixandru is joining our board and our entire team at Ledgy is incredibly excited to partner with her and Sequoia to build the global platform for ownership.
Looking back 🔎
For our team and myself, our first words after closing this round are about gratitude. We want to thank our entire team of Ledgistas, our existing investors, advisors and our customers who supported us since the beginning.
Raising a Series A has been a huge growth and learning process for me and I was lucky to benefit from many great advisors and resources about fundraising. Here are some lessons I learned along the way — I hope that they can benefit founders who are about to go through a similar journey.
Learnings 🤓
1. Dare to think big
One of our team members asked me: “How did you even dare to pitch Sequoia? I mean it’s Sequoia?!” I’ll share one secret: I would have never thought we would end up partnering with Luciana and the Sequoia team when we started to fundraise :) This is not to come across as falsely humble or unconfident. I’m rather sharing this because I think that if more people who think they’re not good enough would actually try things out more boldly, many more great companies would be created. So my top piece of advice is: Aim for the very best you can think of in anything you do. And don’t be disappointed if you fail: at least you will have tried.
2. Have a solid process
Having a very systematic yet simple enough process in place through our fundraising was key to success. Some of the tactics we used:
- Have an investor kanban on which you track the progress of all investors you are speaking with (we used Notion).
- Have a weekly email informing your board on the progress of the fundraise. This helps keep everyone aligned and holds you accountable.
- Create a data room in Notion including your KPIs, investor FAQs, financial projections, cohort analysis, etc. Having this ready before you start your fundraise is a good idea since after the first calls things can move very fast.
A couple of great resources:
- Probably the most helpful resource on Series A I found: Y Combinator’s Series A guide
- Mathilde Collin’s excellent blog post and Series A deck — Mathilde is one of my personal role models and I’m so happy she’s an investor in our Series A! :)
- Fundraisingally.com — Shout out to Pascal Koenig for putting this together, super helpful.
- Fundraisingfieldguide.com
3. Have a great team and advisors
This fundraise couldn’t have happened without a great team. First, it takes a lot of the founders’ time to fundraise, meaning the rest of the team has to jump in to compensate and help. Being intentional and transparent about your shift of focus and delegating your responsibilities during this phase is important. Second, especially as a first-time founder, it was key to get advice from board members, advisors and fellow founders. I couldn’t be more grateful to all the people who helped us in this process.
Looking ahead 🔭
At Ledgy our mission is to empower teams to be owners. Our vision is to build the global platform for ownership. We believe that the world’s biggest challenges will be solved by entrepreneurs, and that democratizing company ownership can be the difference between short-term growth and truly enduring success.
On our way to fulfil our mission and vision, our next step is to strengthen our presence in the rest of continental Europe as well as in the UK to finally establish a standard way for companies to manage ownership. Second, we will increase our feature set to better support public companies as well — a number of them are on Ledgy already.
To achieve the above goals we are expanding our team, and we are looking for fellow Ledgistas to join us on our mission — apply here!
