I’m Abhi, the CEO & Founder of aiphrodite.ai.

aiphrodite.ai is a creative testing tool. We predict the performance of a company’s visual identity.

We are calling it brand tech before it ever goes live.

We are starting with advertising because we can directly replace A/B testing in advertising and predict performance of ads before they go live. 

As we grow, we hope to sit at every creative touchpoint that the end consumer faces like product packaging, book covers, and even brick and mortar experiences.

In April we raised funding from Forum Ventures. We got $145k at a $1.93M cap.

We are currently fundraising for a pre-seed extension round. In an ideal situation, we’ll raise $1.5M at a $6M pre-money cap.

One lesson I learned was to never raise in summer because everyone is on summer vacation – most emails return an “out of office.”

The next round of capital that we are raising is mostly allocated for development. We are doing a lot of R&D in-house as all our models are proprietary. 

We are a Canadian company; Canadian VCs tend to be more conservative. 

We tested our pitch a lot with these VCs and got great traction because of the network we had within the ecosystem. 

We are deciding which investors we want based on who is going to help us go to market the best. Those types of investors tend to be concentrated within New York and Silicon Valley.

We also spend time looking at an investor’s portfolio companies along with if they’ve previously funded or generally helped other ad tech companies.

Forum Ventures — the current accelerator we are part of — definitely helped with the outreach. 

They had their own relationships. That became a huge help for us. Other than that, conferences worked pretty well for us. 

We’re now pretty much relying on cold outreach.

I only sent around 50 total outreach messages before we came into summer vacation season. 

Out of 50, I got 5 or 6 meetings.

At our stage it was definitely the team. I'm super proud of my team and the vision.

There was a generalist VC I was talking to who invests heavily into a lot of e-commerce companies that spend a lot on advertising. 

I was focusing a lot on how we can help their portfolio companies immediately.

Some VCs really like to base decisions on the product, whereas others focus on market size. We focused on what we felt the investor cared about most.

In general we focus on the team and the vision.

Some firms did have fast processes – which helped – but we were also raising during conference season which surprisingly sped things up.

One issue we have faced is that AdTech is a very challenging market from a VC perspective because it tends to be a very competitive space.

A question that continues to come up a lot is “why can't Meta or Google do this?”

We are also a fairly young team so other questions that continually come up are “why can't a PhD or why can't a seasoned marketer do this?”

These questions are ones we continuously face.

You never know who will have interest, so put yourself out there. Apply to accelerators and send cold emails.

Forum Ventures got back to me months after I reached out and invited me to a dinner. 

After the dinner, I jumped on a call with a partner and got the funding. 

I did not have to ever pitch or run a process. It just happened that they liked the company.

Keeping investors in the loop is very important. I didn’t spend enough time on this and didn’t send updates frequently enough.

Eventually, I started sending them every two weeks and this seemed to have a positive impact.

This is less of a fundraising piece of advice, but everyone should validate their idea and talk to users before writing code. 

I know software engineering-focused founders are build-hungry, but don't do that. It is a principle for a reason.

I can speak about Forum Ventures because I've been a part of their accelerator. 

They focus on B2B SaaS and the support is definitely amazing and hyper-personalized. I know that I can message them at 2 a.m. with a problem and they will help.

Definitely read Secrets of Sand Hill Road. 

That book is very important for fundraising and to get started. 

Houck’s Newsletter is also amazing. That is very, very helpful. 

You should also follow all the VCs on LinkedIn and Twitter. They have so much great content and strategies.

VCs need to be more independently-minded. VCs tend to follow the leader instead of being thesis-driven.

My inbox is full of messages right now saying, “did you find a lead?”