Fundraising Should Bring Entrepreneurs Together
Fundraising is Social
When we launched Airdyme in 2018 to help founders discover smart-money investors for their businesses, we had some rough understanding of challenges surrounding the process of fundraising.
For starters, raising capital is a multi-month long process, filled with uncertainty, hope, frustration, and disappointment.
It does indeed feel like throwing tomatoes at the wall, to see what sticks. Alas, common sense takes over, and after hundred or so cold emails gone unanswered, entrepreneur moves on to a more viable way of generating leads — personal introductions.
Weeks pass, and founder that’s building an Enterprise SaaS tool for Real Estate finally scores a meeting with a VC who invested in founder’s friend’s eSports Gaming startups…
It’s not hard to guess how this story ends. Not to mention the amount of time entrepreneurs take away from building their businesses, to attend investor meetings that lead practically nowhere.
To alleviate some of these issues, our vision for Airdyme had to evolve. Startup founders don’t need more investor leads, they need the right investor leads, leads that understand the problem, love the product, respect the founding team, and would be a perfect match for the business in question.
We also thought long and hard about the role of other founders in this process — entrepreneurs, who’s been through the challenge of fundraising, learned a great deal about investment community, and now want to share this knowledge with fellow founders.
There are multiple threads on Reddit discussing various VCs, yet no centralized place to access up-to-date investor information and recommendations, created by real founders, existed. Until now.
Meet Airdyme
We are happy to announce that Airdyme.io is going to become that place. With over 600 investor records, that are based on real conversations with founders, and an active community of entrepreneurs, we want to create a place where founders can find smart-money investors, share information about them with other entrepreneurs, and in the process, create a community that helps one-another keep their entrepreneurial dream alive.
The platform — that has been inspired by the success of Wikipedia — is built upon openness, inclusion, and sharing. It is the only platform of its kind that allows users — not a company — to have full control over its content.
In the weeks prior to launching Airdyme, we’ve created a foundation by adding initial list of investors we have either met, or have heard about from our close circle of entrepreneurial friends. Yet over time, this information has evolved to become truly community-driven, with live updates and most accurate, up-to-date information being included by founders around the world, as they meet these investors in person.
How it works
To use Airdyme, head over to our website, and start by exploring global list of investors — a catalogue that’s been created and maintained by real founders around the world.
You can sort the database, zoom in on investors that match your criteria, like those funding particular industries, or get an eagle view on who is currently in possession of capital to finance startup initiatives.
Finally, get involved and own the database. Make changes to it as your learn new information, and help other founders discover right investors for their businesses.
At Airdyme, we are molding a community based on openness, inclusion, and sharing.
Hope you’ll join in.
