How EchoWi Raised a €750K Pre-Seed in 4 Months From 8 Investors

The company

• EchoWi — optimizes how brands show up in AI-generated answers

• Incorporated in Spain, with primarily European traction

• Raised — €750K from three VC funds and five angel investors, all Spanish

• Instrument — convertible notes, the Spanish near-equivalent of a SAFE

• Conversations with international investors have already started for the next round

Founders

• Team of two co-founders

• Luis — TravelTech at Amadeus and Hotelbeds, investment banking at BBVA

• Maher — data scientist and ML engineer at IBM, Kaggle and Santander

• Both had left their jobs; fixed costs were low

Pipeline and channel

The chart is the VC funnel — 38 funds reached; the five angels came through events and an accelerator, outside it.

• Warm introductions worked best — a successful founder friend from university intro’d four funds

• Those four funds got interested and intro’d more funds in turn

• Cold outreach — a minor part of the reach, around 30 funds, 10% response rate

• Angels — an investment forum at one of the top Spanish universities, plus the SeedRocket accelerator community

• At one point the picture flipped: VCs started reaching out on LinkedIn themselves

• A qualified intro from a founder who has raised is a filter investors trust

Timeline and runway

• Fundraising start — September

• First VC check — €30K from a small fund, within the first month

• Round closed — three to four months in total

• Lead investor signed after the smaller investors were already in; interested investors intro’d the fund that became the lead

• Runway at start — four months, with low fixed costs

• Closing fast mattered more than the runway — back to product and sales

Pitch deck and data room

• Short pitch deck — 12 slides, one clear idea per slide, minimal text

• A long version with go-to-market, defensibility and product detail

• Larger Spanish VCs ask for a full business plan with five-year projections, even in a first round

• Some angels invest after one conversation, on the storytelling and the deck alone

• First calls with investors are always 30 minutes

Most common rejections

• Too early — several of the funds reached were later-stage

• Those funds keep in contact for the second round: “let’s see where you are in two months”

Metrics at close

• Revenue at the start of fundraising — close to zero, a couple of pilots

• MVP already running with some big clients

• Angel checks — €10K to €20K

• VC checks — €30K to €300K; one fund entered with about €300K, others with about €100K

• Instrument — convertible notes

Lessons learned

• Go with convertible notes and close fast — get the first money in, then hire and move the pipeline in parallel

• Don’t wait for a lead investor to appear; take the money from a smaller VC or an angel and start going

• Keep the deck short — 12 slides, one clear idea per slide; investors won’t read dense text

• Read the term sheets and contracts carefully — spend the time, or the money on a lawyer; it has an impact on the next round

• If raising again — skip the cold outreach entirely and go with convertible notes from day one

• Next round — sales focus for two months, active fundraising from early November