BenchSci Series A and Portfolio News From Afore Capital

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Afore Mentioned

5 min readJun 21, 2018

Afore Mentioned — May Newsletter

Liran Belenzon, Co-Founder and CEO of BenchSci, shares his learnings at Afore Founder Lunch Series

BenchSci Raises $8M Series A To Accelerate Drug Discovery

It’s a privilege when you can invest in companies that have the potential to make an impact at the scale of BenchSci — an Afore Capital portfolio company that uses machine learning to scan millions of data points in research papers and surface results that shorten drug discovery cycles. BenchSci’s Series A was led by iNovia Capital and Gradient (Google’s AI fund). With paying customers across some of the largest pharma companies in the world, BenchSci is quickly becoming the platform of choice for lab scientists. For more details, see their announcement. And if you are interested in joining the team, check out their careers page at benchsci.com/about.

Afore Founder Lunch Series

At our recent Founder’s Lunch with Liran Belenzon, Co-Founder and CEO of BenchSci, the Canadian-based entrepreneur shared lessons from the startup’s just announced Series A raise. Here are a few insights from the discussion. To read more, check out our post 6 Unspoken Lessons For Raising Your Series A.

1. Run your fundraising like enterprise sales

Belenzon set up the framework in Asana and approached investors like customers akin to an enterprise sales philosophy. Meeting notes would be added and automatically notify key stakeholders on BenchSci’s team so that board members, established investors, and company teammates could track Belenzon’s progress.

2. Focus on meetings and hand the day to day reins over

Fundraising is a full time job and it’s critical for startup leaders to channel every ounce of their energy into pitching and deal making in order to get the best venture outcomes possible. Belenzon put all his day to day work at BenchSci aside, unloading responsibilities to his co-founder and other senior members of the team. So make a temporary transition of power plan, take off your CEO hat and put on your fundraiser one… your business will thank you for it.

3. Bring your most confident self

When it comes to the success of pitch meetings with VCs — confidence is the energy that can make or break your round. Potential investors are evaluating soft signals as much as your business acumen. Is the founder defensive? What is the body language like? How do the cofounders relate to each other? All of these signs have the potential of displaying a self-assured and rock solid team, product, and vision for the company. That’s the kind of confidence that opens doors to fruitful partnerships and great investors.

Read the full post here.

At our recent Founder’s Lunch with Liran Belenzon, Co-Founder and CEO of BenchSci, sharing lessons from the startup’s Series A raise.

Market Update for Entrepreneurs

We started Afore Capital almost 2 years ago to fill a gap between what earliest stage founders were looking for and what the market is offering them. We based our decision on empirical evidence we observed as institutional investors at prior funds. Our point of view: Pre-Seed is the new Seed… was controversial.

Over the past year what was controversial is slowly becoming mainstream. In that time we have learned that Seed stage round sizes and valuations have spiraled 3X and that companies have been around for 3–4 years before they were able to raise a Seed round.

And new data on the widening gap between Pre-Seed and Seed seem to be coming out with greater frequency. We wanted to highlight two new data points.

In the chart below, the red line shows the percentage of companies with revenue at the Seed stage. In 2010 only 4% of companies raising a Seed round had revenue. Contrast that with what happened in 2017… a whopping 51% of companies raising Seeds had revenue. That’s a massive jump and is only trending higher. Seed stage investors demand significant traction and material revenue, they demand real product-market fit before they would invest. Seeds these days are essentially A rounds.

Percentage of Seed companies with revenues; 4% in 2011 vs. 51% in 2017

Raising a Pre-Seed is beneficial for earliest stage founders for another reason — they have to sell less of the company to investors. From the chart below, we see that companies raising a Pre-Seed sell only 14.3% of the company to investors. Whereas they sell nearly double that — 27.5% — to Seed investors. Equity at the earliest stages is the most expensive equity that founders will be selling and they should be very thoughtful and deliberate about what kind of capital they want to raise: Pre-Seed or Seed.

Equity (%) acquired in Pre-Seed; Founders sell 14% in Pre-Seed vs. 27% in Seed

Our hypothesis is that more and more founders will choose to proactively raise a Pre-Seed round, and as a result we will see more Pre-Seed focused funds.

So what do founders with little or no revenue do? They will come to Pre-Seed funds like Afore.