How Sunbay Raised €610K Across Two Rounds From 6 Investors

The company

• Sunbay — turns chasing invoices into a managed process

• Automated workflows, task queues, escalation with interest notes

• Reporting on what the team actually recovers

• Poland-based and Polish-incorporated

• Raised — €610K across two rounds, from two VC funds and four angels

Founders

• Team of three co-founders

• Filip — operations and automation in startups and scale-ups

• Nikodem — software engineering in startups and banks

• Dawid — finance and operations in startups and scale-ups

Pipeline and channel

The chart covers the €550K seed round; the €60K angel round that came first ran its own, smaller funnel.

• Angel round — 15 to 20 conversations, four offers (20%), two signed (10%)

• Seed round — a process with 45 funds, three or more meetings with eight, two term sheets

• Two more angels joined the seed round from outside those 45 funds

• Network was the most effective channel — the founders’ own and their angels’

• Events came second — Slush, and events in Poland

• Cold email was barely used and did not work; LinkedIn only where a connection was mutual

Timeline and runway

• Angel round — €60K, nine months

• Seed round — €550K, five months, closed in March 2026

• Runway when the seed round started — four months, and the raise took five

• Bootstrapped through the first round, on no salaries

• Lead investor — Cognito VC, met cold at Slush

• Cognito passed first, met one of Sunbay’s angels two months later, then came back

Pitch deck and data room

• Basic information about the company

• Financials — the MRR and the plans behind it

• More detail on the product and the vision

• Every metric they had, showing real usage of the app

• The story of the company and of the founders

• Pitch deck

Metrics at close

• MRR at the angel round’s start — €1.5K

• MRR at the seed round’s start — €3.5K

• Instrument — a CLA, since Poland has no SAFE: a loan that converts to equity

• Caps — €2M bottom, €5M top, with a 25% discount

• Angel checks — €20K to €50K

• VC checks — €100K to €300K

Lessons learned

• Be likable — investors compare many good startups, and energy is part of the pitch

• Be transparent; angels attract angels, and angels make VCs take a look

• Create momentum and aim to close the round within a few weeks

• Do not be defensive — ambitious projections beat a catalogue of risks

• Sell the ten-year vision, not the next three months of roadmap

• Stop at the third meeting with a fund; a seventh is time lost, not interest