Matching smart money with great companies
What we do at Chausson Finance — and a couple of Star-Wars GIFs
It all starts with fundraising
Curiously, fundraising is regarded as the most hype part of being an entrepreneur. When you succeed, you get a lot of attention, congratulations and press for raising a few millions euros, which is weird since closing a million dollar contract from a client won’t get you any tangible attention from your peers.
So why the fuss?
1. It’s super hard and a lot of great people fail at it (there is a statistical 2% success rate for a Series A > €2m in France)
2. Fundraising is a matter of life and death when a start-up’s business model requires heavy funding (that’s the case for most SaaS and marketplaces models). Plus, it’s the ultimate self-test: all it is takes to succeed is talking about you, your company, your vision and your achievements.
That’s why when it’s hard or when you fail, your whole world starts falling appart.
That’s where we come in.
First, we tell you with 95% accuracy whether or not you’re in a position to raise money, and how much you can expect. As a matter of fact, we won’t work with you if we don’t think that you’ve achieved enough at the time to raise at least €2–5m. How do we know that? Mostly magic.
(if you need to know, we’re doing it by knowing our market and crunching numbers)
If we decide to work with you, then what happens? VCs don’t have much time to spend on an investment opportunity, so we make it easy to understand what you do and why it’s amazing. And most of the time the features we chose to bring forward are *not* the ones you pick (for instance, CEOs often want to describe their product a lot more than required, and skip the dreaded talk about the competition).
On top of saving you a bunch of hours of self-doubt in front of an excel sheet, this process will make you rediscover your own business and see strategic issues that you’d probably neglected beforehand.
Process-wise, we do all the grunt work in your stead — short for pitching in front of VCs. We present your company over the phone to the best European VCs (we’ve done deals with plenty of non-French VCs including Index, Rocket, Point Nine, …). We get them to meet you in your time frame. We produce the documentation needed based on your strategic inputs and raw data.
Plus, we help you “straighten up” your company’s back office and get “investor ready”. Like 90% of the entrepreneurs, you probably lack time to maintain a proper, VC-proof reporting. Maybe you still query your system through SQL requests to get your marketing KPIs instead of having a proper dashboard (true story). But no challenge is too big for us, we’ll help you get organized and scale-ready.
Finally, we’ll give you unfair advantages when pitching…. by giving you the detailed backgrounds of the people you’ll meet: who will challenge you on the metrics? Who has a passion for setting traps? Who is BS averse to the point that he will take a fake phone call and leave if you’re boring him too much (true story)?
Which leads me to my next point
It’s a hard and demanding process,
and we will help you through it
There is always a point during a fundraising process when you think that you’ll never make it. And that’s normal, that’s why we do processes in the first place. Maybe a competitor has raised a massive round, maybe you did not close that massive contract in time. But with 195 deals behind us, we’ve seen a lot of complex situations, and we’ll put that experience to work to overcome everything that comes at you.
Want to get in touch for advice about your upcoming fundraising? We’d love to hear from you. To get in touch, you can set a meeting with me at Ladurée or message me on Linkedin
You can also check out our previous article about fundraising in the US
And also, happy holidays!!
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