Notes on raising a deeptech seed in 2026

for non-consensus deeply ambitious teams on the US-India corridor

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Everyone loves giving fundraising advice. There is something addictive about the posture involved in telling founders how to raise money. Yet, most fundraising advice is not useful to the average non-Bay non-AI founder. This is because it generally comes from
a) VCs. There is some value in knowing how some of them think but most are too disconnected from what it actually takes to build, especially at the earliest stages
b) YC founders. As of 2026, YC is mainstream, has pedigree and are/shape consensus, so this advice is useless for most founders operating out of those straitjackets
c) Second-time founders. Completely different game than first-time founders who generally don’t remember what it was like the first time around
d) Bay area founders. You build a rolodex of intros just going to house parties and working in frontier tower. Raising is 10-100x harder when you can’t iMessage your blurb

Itamar and I went through a ~4 month grind of raising our seed for Dognosis, and emerged with 2 healthy years of runway for a deeply ambitious, deeply weird non-Bay area, non-trad-AI company. Dognosis breaks pattern-matching across the board, so hopefully there is useful emergent signal in what follows. A lot of this is also stuff I wish someone had told me, the practical and tactical stuff that ends up mattering a lot more than you’d expect.

As always, feel free to take things seriously but not literally. Your mileage will always vary.

Take care of yourself

The most important piece is to have solid days. Being strong psychologically is probably the biggest factor in raising a great round, everything else is downstream. You will underestimate this. Sleeping and eating well, lifting/running, not being super stressed (normal stressed is fine) - all of these can and will show up in the way your energy comes off in pitches. And not doing these things has a blast radius of how you show up with the rest of your team, and it’s important you show up strong.

Timing

A seed can take longer than you think. The two week “party sprint” is 2021 SaaS and 2026 Agents. If you’re a hot sector / exceptionally on top of your game / lucky, going from first pitch to wire in <1 month is still possible, but you want to plan for this not being the case to make sure your company doesn’t die. Work backwards from 12mos of running out of runway. This is when you start planning your raise, keeping in mind the right season where you will still have 6mos+ runway. Don’t underweight the importance of seasons in the US. Raising 3 weeks before Thanksgiving is a bad idea (trust me) and timing the launch of your raise poorly will be the single biggest variable of its success.

So if it’s today (April 1 2026) and you need to raise by April 2027, you want to start actively devoting time to fundraising beginning now and prep to launch start of Fall in August. That way, even if things don’t go as planned, you can come back in the next season (Jan) with enough distance to not seem stale.

Preparing to raise with 12mos of runway mainly looks like connecting with other founders, especially those whose last raised round is the same one you’re looking to raise now. If you’re raising a seed, it’s not a bad idea to also reach out to founders who have shot past a Series C, but they may be less useful in their insight and intros than a founder who just raised a strong seed 3-15mos ago.

Intros and Top-of-Funnel

You generally want to connect with founders as founders/friends, and not as a means to intros. This can be hard, especially if the founders in question are in the Bay and you’re in Bangalore and there are no obvious ways to connect/collaborate other than the intro. There is no perfect/ideal way to do this, honesty and transparency is generally appreciated, as well as being mindful that founders tend to be busier than your average VC and its not their job to look out for dealflow for their VCs. Getting a B1/O1 and spending time in SF can definitely help.

The more valuable a founder’s rolodex of intros, the busier they likely are. Make it as easy as possible for them to help you. Send forwardables and tailored blurbs. Follow-up proactively and politely, though don’t hound them if they have displayed hesitation. A warm intro is not “free”, the founder often expends time + social capital by the exercise of taste. At the same time, if there is a strong fit + they understand what you do + are generally rooting for you, it can be win-win to provide the intro.

Ideally, you want to have a strong set of founders who are rooting for you with strong non-overlapping intros from funds they raised from. You are almost always better off waiting to get a solid set of 10+ (the more the better) strong intros that should land you calls, before you kick off your raise. You can/should talk to VCs you don’t really care about, use analyst calls to brush up your story and deck, and generally get some good practice reps and feedback in. But try to be in a place where you only pull the trigger once you feel confident in your top-of-funnel. The reasons for this are straightforward - a) if things go really well and you land a termsheet, the only way you have leverage in negotiation is with another termsheet, b) if things don’t go well in the first set of calls, you want more shots at goal before you run out of momentum.

Do the usual things of making a spreadsheet or control room or whatever on funds you think are a fit, intro pathways to get there, check size, etc etc. Build out a set of warm intros to as many funds as possible. The best ones are from founders, but they can also come from your can come from friends/advisors of the fund, and your current investors. Cold emailing/DMing can be worth a shot but has a very low chance of success, with the current scenario with agents making this worse. Same with forms on websites. You can try it, and can optimize for it but it likely is far more useful to find the right warm intro.

Strong angels can be a great start to a raise as well. These can either be “status angels”, like a Balajis whose value comes from signalling power, or “cheerleader angels”, whose value can come from their network and time. The best angels will meet you over a 30min call or a 45min coffee, and sign a $25k SAFE with a valuation you choose the next day. The worst angels can roleplay like a first-time VC. Make sure to avoid the latter.

An underrated but tricky play to make a concerted PR push to generate organic inbound. This can look like founders posting savvily on socials, earned media, or announcing your last fundraise in a big way. The reason its tricky is that it can take meaningful effort/attention away from building and it is not trivial to get right. But the value of having investors reaching out to you to build top-of-funnel can be quite useful. Beware the analysts/VCs just making quota on their KPI. You want to check that the fund in question is actively deploying (when was their last investment is usually a good way to sus out zombie VCs).

Story

Really get your story down. This takes longer than you think. See Khosla’s Nailing your raise as a good primer for what VCs generally expect your story to do. TL;DW - Each slide should have a single message that crafts the story by conveying fear or greed. You don’t have to take this literally but it is a useful heuristic. Assume investors will spend less than 5s per slide and less than 1-2min on the deck when you first send it. Get a freelance designer to iterate with you, polishing up versions. Don’t underestimate good design but definitely don’t overestimate its ability to patch over a weak story.

You and your co-founders remain a big part (the biggest for good seed VCs) of the story. Why are you spiky along the 1-3 dimensions which really matters to win in your timeline of massive success?

What is massive success? How are you worth $XB, where X is downstream of math that funds will all be making, dependent on how they solve the trilemma of fund size, portfolio size and check size.

Get a decent intuition of this math. It looks like -
A 50M fund with average 1M check that looks for 5-20% ownership at a 5-20M valuation needs your exit to be worth their entire fund. If they own 1-5% at exit (with expected dilution until M&A or IPO), they need your exit to be $1-5B. Depending on your sector/market, you can ballpark the TAM they need for their math to make sense.

In effect, this means you should never shy away from the most ambitious TAM your story is capable of. Even if it can sound wild and implausible, and doesn’t end up being a focus in the actual pitch, having the “real” TAM anchor the “1% odds of success story” allows for bigger funds to still make bets that make sense.

But don’t bend over backwards to make this math work, the story is still what matters most.

Go-to-market is a crucial piece of the story. Seed->SeriesA for many startups is about executing on GTM. If you’re the type of deep-tech where this is not true, you’d want to craft a story on why the de-risking you’re doing makes eventual GTM a no-brainer. In many cases, the crux of your pitch may be convincing the investor that you won’t die before your next round.

Build a FAQ for people to look at when doing diligence. Build a deck appendix to answer questions on a call. Build a data room for people to dig in further. If you’re worried about people sharing your material with competitors, use DocSend. If you’re not worried, still use Docsend but also consider sharing a zip folder so the analyst/principal/partner can play with your material in their LLM of choice. Try this yourself, use an account without any context on your company and put in the dataroom with a typical prompt a VC may use. This is useful feedback. Use different LLMs. Gemini can be quite different from Claude.

Really nailing your story can take a lot more time than you expect and often involves serious customer discovery, roadmap charting and self-reflection.

Momentum

Momentum, and conveying momentum, is everything. A well-crafted story will still fall flat if you’re not able to convey that you’re riding a strong wave of momentum, both in terms of the traction/validation of your story, and the raise itself. Your story ideally lays the scene for why you’re at the peak of crushing it, but the way you conduct the raise can matter a lot more. Which leads to

Vibes

Ultimately, remember that rounds raised before Series A (generally the first priced round nowadays) are mostly based on pure vibes. Substance matters but not as much as you think. Signalling, playing round dynamics, and the way you tell your story (“story-telling”) matters a lot more than first-time founders expect. What this concretely means -

a) Backchannel as much as possible

b) Be careful about how you signal interest from other funds. VCs have a much richer training set than you on what signals generally mean, and what they do not. They all talk to each other, and the world is always smaller than you’d expect.¹

c) Valuation is going to primarily be based on how much leverage you have and your perceived “heat”

etc etc

The topic of how to get a strong round size (or good valuation, same thing) is pretty well-covered by second-time and YC type founders who understand the signalling game well.²

It can be demotivating to realize that the success of your raise - the rocket-fuel for your life’s-work, and the “price” you get for it - can be primarily dictated by the vibes you project on a 30 minute call. While this is unfortunately true (for the most part) for any given meeting, by pushing to stack the odds in your favour as much as possible and then running the numbers enough times, you can still wrestle control back in your court. And once you nail your raise, you get to go back to the harder, but also realer and funner part - building the future.

Dogspeed,

Akash

1. A potential exception is seed specialists across geography, e.g. an Indian seed specialist may not actually know a Boston seed specialist, so geographical arbitrage is possible

2. Celine has great essays on fundraising - https://www.celinehh.com/writings, NFX also has some useful stuff. Many X users main hobby is talking about fundraising