Building Before Fundraising: How Polinate Kept Customers First

Polinate's two co-founders are 19. Their traction is growing fast, and so is the noise around them from accelerators, angels, and VCs all trying to "help". Which is a lot for their first raise, especially when they're customer-obsessed, and see raising as a distraction.

To be honest, they were initially skeptical of our value add during our first call. But over the past 3 months, we've become the people they call first and trust most to talk through their thinking.

Just today, we offered to unblock them as much as possible on their fundraising process

— intros, emails, meeting scheduling, follow-ups — just so they could stay in builder mode.

But we haven't pushed them. Despite us being ready to invest 2 months ago, they've wanted to focus on their customers for now, running fundraising in the background - and we've supported that decision. They know what's best for Polinate and we exist to serve that.

That's the balance we try to strike where we're always reachable, but never overbearing, as our belief is in the founders and their ability to execute on their vision. Most conversations end with me telling Adeep (co-founder) to simply ignore the noise, and trust himself.