This page is maintained by @Stephane Roux
TL;DR: Yes, fundraising is hard–it helps if you really like your investors.
We're lucky to have some amazing investors on board! You can find an overview of our funding and investors here:
Wonder Fundraising history
Our Investors
Our main investors are EQT Ventures and BlueYard Capital - here are the two people we work with on a regular basis
Jenny Dreier from EQT Ventures
Ciaran O'Leary from BlueYard Capital
Our experiences with fundraising
There are lots of rumours around fundraising, so we will share our experiences here (without claiming that they are generalizable).
- Fundraising is super hard. Funds make far fewer investments than people think (each Partner will make a handful per year), so just because they like your team or your idea, doesn't mean they will invest. This means that even if you're successful, you will mostly hear rejections.
- It's extremely distracting. First, it's time-consuming and it adds plenty of unpredictable high-priority meetings and tasks to your week. Second, it's high-stakes and therefore captures the attention of everyone in the founding team. This means it's very hard to make any progress while fundraising.
- VCs are mostly nice and interesting people! We had conversations with plenty of smart, insightful and empathetic people. Many of them went out of their way to help us or to give us feedback (even a personalised rejection helps!). At the end of the day, they also want to invest, and they try their best to build conviction around an idea, product or team.
Here are two articles on fundraising that we found helpful: