Meeting angels during those fragile first months

I believe it is the most interesting phase of a startup company; these first few fragile months. Your idea goes from nothing to something. You see a product taking shape – first in sketches on a white board, then on the screen and eventually into something that actually works that you get to put in front of your users. Those same users that you’ve been talking to over weeks and months, asking questions, running experiments and trying to understand what they need, when they sometimes don’t even know it themselves. You write. You re-write. You try to put on paper what is so clear in your mind, yet the words escape you and the description sounds so bland when it’s in a powerpoint. And you do all of these with no money in the bank, scraping by and dreaming of the day you can hire someone to help you out.

And then, there are the investors. We must have met more than 100 amazing individuals the last 6 months. Some of them loved us immediately. Some didn’t understand. Some rejected us flat out. Many told us to keep up the good work and come back when the risk is lower and the tool better and the user numbers growing. Putting your money on an early stage startup – particularly one driven by a crazy 10-year vision doing frontier tech development – is risky business.

But we found them. I never quite understood why people were called angel investors until going through this full process. They are individuals who are willing to take a risk, who believe in us and who trust in our abilities to work out the messy path of an early stage startup enough that are willing to fund us while we do so. We found our angels.

We are happy to announce that we have officially closed our pre-seed investment round, having raised $350,000. This will bring us way beyond our next launch and has allowed us to double our team over the last few months. Tharald, Sean & Stina, Thomas, Sjur & Sjur, Øyvind and Philipp – we are thrilled that you believe in us and excited to have you join us on our journey.