How Webout (now Fourtly) Raised $2.3M Across Two Rounds From 5 Investors

The company

• Webout, now Fourtly — a SaaS platform driving sales and engagement through personalized content

• Every customer gets a tailor-made video: their name, their relevant products, offers and visuals

• Incorporated in the Czech Republic, with traction primarily in Europe

• Raised — $2.3M across two rounds: a $400K pre-seed and a $1.9M seed

• Seed round backed by one corporate VC, two VC funds and two angel syndicates

Founders

• Team of two first-time co-founders

• Michal — creative producer at several agencies before starting his own, with clients such as Hyundai, Uber, Pfizer and Erste Bank

• Karel — software developer and tech lead at several European enterprises, primarily building OTT platforms

• Their business mentor, Vitek Schubert, told them to start raising and opened the door to the lead investor

• One co-founder moved to San Francisco just before the close, to finish the agreements in person — “we showed them our dedication”

Pipeline and channel

The chart is the seed funnel — 80 investors reached for the $1.9M round. The one term sheet came from the lead; the co-investors joined on letters of intent.

• A combination of everything — a big spreadsheet of cold investors they approached themselves, plus warm introductions from people who opened doors

• About 20% of the list was warm and 80% cold — but roughly 80% of the money came from the warm side and 20% from cold

• The business mentor opened the door to the bank that became the lead investor; investors from the first round helped open others

• One investor came from a conference

• Personalized video as outreach — every investor got a video made with the product, with their own name and face inside it

• Inboxes are spammed — getting through to investors by email was the hard part

Timeline and runway

• Pre-seed — $400K, closed in six months

• Seed — $1.9M in 10 months: five months to find the lead investor, five months of negotiation and assembling the group

• A corporate VC sets its own pace — a meeting agreed for September happened in November; two months of silence that had nothing to do with interest

• Lead investor — the corporate VC of a Slovak bank, Erste Bank; it also operates in the Czech Republic and could see Webout’s results with its Czech branch

• Meeting in person is what moved it — an hour at the bank to show the product, the founders and the energy

• Runway at start — five to six months; the money landed about five months later than planned, so survival mode: budget cuts and letting people go

Pitch deck and data room

• Pitch deck, updated roughly every week, with the version or date of the last update on it

• Financial and business forecast in two versions — a simple one for first contact, a detailed one for later meetings

• Go-to-market strategy, sales pipeline, key team members, competitors, cap table

• A personalized video for each investor — the product demonstrated on the investor themselves

• The deck was restructured mid-raise — shorter, more value-focused, simplified after every meeting; say the rest in follow-ups

Most common rejections

• Everyone assumed it was AI — investors filed it under “another AI video generation company” and passed, because that category is crowded

• In reality AI does only 2–3% of the work, placing the personalization onto real footage — so the founders had to prove they were not an AI company

• They didn’t see the sales value — a name on a jersey read as a nice-to-have rather than a sales tool, despite the case studies

• Defensibility — “What’s stopping other companies from doing the same thing the next day?”

Metrics at close

• Total revenue — about $600K over four years of the company

• ARR doubled over the last year

• Check size range — roughly €400–700K; the angel syndicate wrote a bigger check than the lead

• An angel syndicate also wrote one of the biggest checks in the pre-seed round

Lessons learned

• Raise sooner — the first answer to every lessons question; they started late, and a mentor had to push them to start

• Put good advisors on the team and show them in the deck — a first-time team backed by senior people

• Run the fundraise as a sales process, and bet on warm introductions

• Make the funnel big, then choose — don’t close the round with the first three investors who say yes

• If raising again — double the cold funnel so there is more to choose from, and take sales seriously earlier to build real traction

• Next round — Series A, opening at the beginning of 2027 to give it 12 months and close at the end of 2027