Most start-ups ask the same thing: “I have a great idea. How do I get money?”. Raising money for an innovative idea or a new start-up company is challenging. It requires patience, persistence, and an excellent strategy to approach investors.
Dan Hobbs and Ciarán O’Mara, founders at Protex AI, managed to raise $18 million for their project and share some useful tips.
During this year’s Dublin Tech Summit, the two entrepreneurs discussed how they managed to find such a large investment capital within 18 months.
Never give up
“I think everybody talks about the headlines and stuff like that, but it took forever to get people to take our project seriously. I’m sure that there are people starting companies here as well, and you have an idea and you are trying to get people on the same wavelength as you. We spoke to hundreds of investors at the very start, so it wasn’t just like it happened overnight,” Dan Hobbs noted.
From his perspective, Ciarán O’Mara pointed out the importance of networking. As he highlighted, new entrepreneurs should not give up at the first difficulty. “You should pick up yourself and learn from your mistakes and become better”. He also emphasized that start-up founders shouldn’t focus only on raising money because this is a very demanding process. According to Ciarán O’Mara, it may take months to find investors. Entrepreneurs need to prepare properly, create an attractive demo of their project and try to catch the vibe of each prospective investor.
Back in 2022, Protex AI announced that it managed to raise a total of $18 million in investment to help further grow its presence in Europe and North America.
Working with blue-chip brands such as leading UK retailer Marks & Spencer (M&S), Protex AI’s always-on solution revolutionises how enterprise safety teams make proactive safety decisions. The privacy-preserving AI platform plugs into existing CCTV infrastructure. It uses its computer vision technologies to capture unsafe events autonomously in various settings, such as warehouses, manufacturing facilities, and ports.
The importance of networking – investment
During the Dublin Tech Summit, Dan Hobbs explained that approaching investors was quite a difficult task, especially amid a pandemic. To overcome this obstacle, they build a strong network of potential investors and focus on listening to their desires and feeling their vibes during each presentation.
Protex AI raised $18m from Notion, Playfair, Firstminute, Elkstone, and Y Combinator to empower health and safety teams and protect workers with AI-powered technology.
In an article on Medium titled “Why we invested in Protex AI,” Henrik Wetter Sanchez from Playfair describes Ciarán and Dan as “two passionate and extremely smart founders with the drive to build a startup from the ground up.” It seems that the passion shown by the two young entrepreneurs, combined with the fact that they tried to describe most vividly how their project can benefit society, played a decisive role.
“As an investor, I take a dozen pitches every week (~600 every year), and it is extremely rare that I leave that first call with an unequivocal feeling that I have to be part of this company’s journey, whatever it takes. My call in April 2021 with Dan and Ciarán was one of those lucky ones and we didn’t look back.”
According to expert analysts, only 1% of start-ups that have made first contact with an investor will eventually receive funding.
On average, an investor will evaluate 1,000 ideas to invest in only ten. The whole process is short and straightforward. After all, the bottom line when someone invests money is trust, which takes time to be earned.
A new entrepreneur can reach an agreement with investors even two years after the first contact. A helpful tip that one can follow is to keep sending updates to prospective investors on how the project is progressing, thus building a relationship of trust.
