Is it difficult to raise money? How long did it take? What milestones does my startup have to meet? What do investors have to understand about my company?
We interviewed founders that closed successful VC rounds at very early stages of their startups. Click below on each date to learn from them.
🇸🇪 QA tech, developing an AI-based QA tester enabling engineers to become more productive by automating testing of applications, raised $1 million pre-seed in a round led by byFounders. (press release)
Here’s Daniel, QA’s CEO:
How would you sell your product to a non-tech tester?
- The first thing would be to tell them the story about testing, how much time it takes, and how important it is. Unless you understand that, it’s hard to convey how much time and money a tool like ours can save.
- Our main users are developers, so we really focus on their experience. We want to create the best bug reports ever, making it super simple to be productive and not get slowed down by testing processes.
What does the AI behind the tech actually do in simple words? How much % is your data and how much is third party?
- We use LLM-based agents to convert an objective (for example logging in) to a set of actions. To successfully figure out the steps needed we have created a large data set of common patterns and flows on how a login process usually works.
- Our system does a lot of preprocessing of the data we send to the agent as well to handle limited context windows and reduce time and cost of usage.
What have you accomplished so far since you started?
- Our first milestone was when we created a model that could take any URL and figure out what functionality was present on that site, and then test the functions.
- The first function we tested for was a GDPR cookie banner – and we managed to make the agent detect it, then dismiss it, reload the page, and ensure it didn’t appear again. Then clear its cookies, reload, and verify that it would show up again.
What are your next milestones for the startup?
- About a month from start to close.
From a scale 1 to 10 how difficult was it to raise the money?
- I would give it a 3 – we thought it would be much harder than it actually was, due to the overall financial climate. But riding on the AI wave, and being experienced founders with a track record really helped.
- It was very easy once we actually started talking to VCs, but we spent way to much time worrying about things like the pitch deck design…
What did the investors backing the round understand about QA Tech and its market?
- How huge the market is, and what an incredible time and cost savings a product like ours can offer.
What didn’t the investors who passed understand?
- How we differentiate from low-code/no-code tools on the market.
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