Founders With Funding: Navid Razazi, Youpic
Looking for funding? In these special Let’s Talk blog posts Capital On Stage connects with founders who received funding from one of the events.
Swedish with Persian origin, Navid had always loved photography and at aged 15 he bought a super expensive camera, ‘but i needed skills to take good pictures, not just the pricey equipment’. Hence YouPic, the online platform for photographers to learn from each other. In 2012–2013 Navid joined a 10 week incubator programme which helped take the idea to a service, YouPic currently has 100,000 to 1 million users per month. One of the main challenges that Navid identifies is the duality of growing and developing the company whilst simultaneously getting it funded, ‘companies such as ours focus on scalability and user engagement rather than revenue, therefore it’s even more important to be at events such as Capital On Stage’.
The ultimate goal for YouPic is to be the place where everyone goes to learn about the world’s biggest hobby, photography. Wanting to be closer to the European market, Navid took a chance and took part in the Amsterdam 2015 Conference, afraid it would be Dutch investors looking only for Dutch companies he was pleasantly surprised to find a host of international VCs and admired the one-to-one meetings with VCs which differentiate Capital On Stage from other big conferences. The start-up has been funded a couple of times and is about to close their latest round of funding which came from that Capital On Stage event; ‘as a pre-revenue company, funding is the air that we breathe and the Capital On Stage conference enabled us to keep developing the product’.
Advice for other founders: the whole process is long and arduous, so focus on the journey not the end goal, as an entrepreneur you are never happy — if you are, your done!
This could be you! Are you a funding-ready founder with a scalable tech/web business? Then Capital On Stage could lend a hand in demystifying capital and help YOU get funded. We hold physical match-making events globally, where VCs pitch to founders and you’re guaranteed at least TWO private one-to-one meetings with the investors of your choice. Sound like your kinda thing? Go to http://www.capitalonstage.com/en/events/ for more.
