How Besample Raised $1.5M Across Three Rounds From 24 Investors

The company

The $1.5M total spans three rounds; the funnel below covers only the final $1.1M round.

• Besample — a marketplace for research participants, mainly academic researchers

• Total raised — $1.5M from 24 investors across three rounds

• Round 1 — $220k friends & family

• Round 2 — $150k from two accelerators, including Techstars

• Round 3 — $1.1M from a VC fund and three angels

Founders

• Female-led team of four co-founders

• Elena — PhD in social psychology, led communications for a university, big tech and an AI startup

• Tamila — built a marketplace for digital nomads

• Rina — built a chain of escape quests

• Ivan — founded several companies in travel tech and manufacturing

Pipeline and channel

• Investors reached — 900 total

• First meetings — 55, a 6% conversion

• Second meetings — 6 (0.6%); DD — 2 (0.2%); term sheet — 1 (0.1%)

• Channels used — Techstars network, personal network, cold outreach

• Personal network converted best

• Cold outreach converted to calls, not checks, but taught how VCs evaluate the business

Timeline and runway

• Timeline — 7 months, start to close

• Techstars graduation — May 2024

• Investor calls — June to August 2024

• Term sheet received — October 2024

• Money in the bank — December 2024

• Runway ran through year-end — team got nervous near the close

Pitch deck and data room

• Investors who wrote the check never looked at the pitch deck

• Deck was rewritten after almost every investor conversation

• Due diligence with the lead fund went deep and took months

• Due diligence included the fund talking directly to customers

Most common rejections

• Most rejections came as a flat no, no reason given

• When a reason was given — “we don’t understand the segment”

• Founder’s read — a polite way of saying the market looked too small

• Segment (behavioural & social science research) sized at $4–8B a year

• Eventual lead investor deliberately sought overlooked, messy markets

Metrics at close

• Lead check — $1M from Gutter Capital, a pre-seed fund (their minimum check size)

• Angels — $100k combined from three angels

• Revenue at close — about $100k annual GMV (marketplace, not ARR)

• GMV was volatile month to month, not subscription-based

• Also tracked — researcher registrations, especially from top schools

• Trust and product feedback mattered more to the team than revenue

Lessons learned

• Top tip — join accelerators for capital, advisory support and community

• Leverage your personal network

• Your own clients can become investors too

• Bootstrap if you possibly can

• In hindsight — would spend more time talking to customers, not investors

• Biggest mistake to avoid — treating investor feedback as an evaluation of your business