Investing €50-€150K tickets in early-stage startups in CEE.
Standard convertible note. No strings attached.
Run and backed by founders and operators
The syndicate is ran and backed mostly by founders and operators, who’ve gone through top accelerators like Y-Combinator and 500Startups, built startups from inception to exit, including unicorns and centaurs, and others who’ve scaled from $0 to $50M+ ARR.
How we help
We know, every investor and VC says they will be helpful. Our approach is two-fold: (1) be transparent up front what kind of help we can deliver, and (2) rethink how we create structure and incentivize our member founders & operators to invest their time in your startup not just for a virtual coffee, but on consistent and regular basis.
It's so much harder for investors to support companies when they haven't had the lived experience as an operator.
-Alexis Ohanian, @ Reddit
Get to product/market fit faster
We know how fun and hard startup life is. Our main focus is helping you think through your product, positioning, go-to-market strategy, distribution channels, pricing, product-led-growh as you are progressing toward your next financial milestone, mostly Series A.
How it works:
- we match you with the most fitting advisor for the stage and issues you’re dealing with,
- run a structured workshop to kick things off and be able to create a roadmap, and
- facilitate a three-month bi-weekly advisory program to guide you through the execution of the roadmap.
Help fundraise
As soon as we invest, we supercharge your fundraising through:
- finetuning your pitch, storyline,
- fundraising strategy,
- helping build your investor list,
- making intros,
- advising on outreach automation, and
- help navigate the process,
so you’re able to construct a round of the most relevant angels and funds. When you're ready to raise your next round, we can help with that, too.
Our focus and investment details
Stage
We invest in pre-seed and seed stage startups. We love early stage, and are not shy being the first money in the round. That said you should at least have an MVP and some market traction. But we also invest between rounds, post-seed and pre-Series A. If you're about to raise a Series A soon, we might be able to connect you with the best investors for your stage.
Check size
Typically €50K-€150K at first. But we do like to invest 5-10X the amount in the follow on rounds.
Industry
We invest broadly but we mostly prefer B2B SaaS and marketplaces, as that’s where our member founders and operators specialize. With other businesses it just might take a bit longer for us to evaluate - so you are welcome to apply.
Some of the investors
See a few of our 130+ members featured below. You can see their experience → here.
Our investing process
- Fill out our simple application question and share your deck.
- 20min Zoom intro call.
- 45min workshop session with our member founders, operators.
- That’s all we need to decide.
FAQ for founders
One line item on your cap table, behind which are lots of super fans and collective brainpower for scaling your startup.
There is no cost to pitch. If the syndicate invests in your company, we charge a €1,500-€3,000 to onboard in our founder & operator community, and match with the most fitting advisor(s) to help fill the current round by helping streamline the fundraising process and doing investor intros, or do a go-to-market & product focused structured one month advisory program to help you unlock the most important growth bottleneck.
If you aren’t ready to fundraise >$250K and we like the company, we’d be happy to spend 3–6 months helping to prepare you for your first round. This typically covers everything from helping define the storyline, competitive edge, pricing, distribution channels to pitch review, fundraising timeline and strategy, investor lists, approach to outreach, tech stack.
We review your application and respond to in 1-2 days time. If we like what we see, we’d schedule a short call to get acquainted. If that goes well, shortly after we set up a deep dive discussion with you and some of our accomplished founders - in these calls we not only evaluate your startup, team and potential, but also try to provide free advice. After this call we collect interest from our syndicate members regarding investment, and come back to you shortly with a decision. The final step before signing and wiring the funds is doing a quick due diligence to check if there are any red flags.
At an early stage the founder should come up with the paperwork, and we are flexible about the format, as long as it is standard. We prefer SAFE, convertible notes, and in some occasions we have done equity investments, because of special situations where founders require that.
Regardless of the investment agreement format we do require information rights and pro-rata rights. Here is one resource for standard docs.
It typically takes 3-4 weeks from our first conversation. Occasionally, there might be some red flags we spot in the due diligence process, which we try to iron out with you - this might add a week or two to the process.
We set up a mailing list where we include the syndicate members who have invested in your company, and ask you to send them investor updates. Many of our investors want to be helpful in the area they can, so make sure to include an ask in every monthly investor update.
We invest in companies registered in EU and Delaware. No problem if your entity is registered elsewhere - we will happily offer advice as to the most attractive jurisdictions in the eyes of VCs and angel investors.
We are based in Baltics, our members are all over the world, but we live on the internet.
Here are the main things:
- What is the problem you are trying to solve, the solution you offer, the customer you are serving
- How you make money
- How are you acquiring your customers, eg, content, SEO, partnerships, direct sales, affiliate, community
- how have you been growing (eg, in the last 6-months growing 10%+ MoM)
- Who is your competition
- how well rounded is the team and how many full time
- when product was launched
- Do you have a clear plan where will you put raised capital to use and what will be your runway (eg, 18 mo)
No problem, reach out to me r@badideas.fund