My name is Keith Corso — co-founder and CEO of BusRight. 

We are increasing the safety and efficiency of the nation's largest mass transit system — school buses. 

School buses transport 26M students to and from their education daily, but this system is managed using old-school pen and paper methods or super antiquated software.

This is causing and/or exacerbating a crippling driver shortage, increased route complexity, overwhelming parent demands, and threatening the effectiveness of K-12 transportation.

We’ve raised ~$15M across 4 different rounds of financing. 

Your initial rounds of funding are meant for experimentation. 

There are clear metrics that a company should aim for to attract its next round of investors.

As an example, investors want to see $1M in ARR for a Series A.

It's good to be aware of what those guardrails are, but the primary goal in the early days is to validate product-market fit as quickly as possible.

Are people pulling out their wallets, paying you, and staying with you? Everything else is just noise.

There's a lot of flexibility in the early days regarding where your money actually gets allocated. It can be shifted from one bucket to another as you determine what works and what doesn't. 

We initially thought we'd be able to use free tablets from T-Mobile because when you buy a data plan from T-Mobile, you receive a free tablet. 

We didn’t know that those tablets don’t work in extreme temperatures. You drop them on a bus, they break. If they get dusty, they don't work. 

They lack some of the essential technology such as GPS & telematic sensors. 

We had to invest several hundred dollars on one tablet — we have thousands in use across the country. 

There's only so much visibility into that, especially when you're still figuring out the foundation of the business.

Do they invest in your stage? Are they comfortable with a pre-seed company, a Series A, etc.? 

A lot of investors claim they invest across stages. Go view their LinkedIn profile or Crunchbase and browse their recent board positions and investments to see how active they are at your stage.

They might say they invest early because they want insight on emerging companies that they can build relationships with.

The metrics that they benchmark you against are relative to the other companies they're already evaluating/stages they are focusing on.

If their primary focus is on Series A or B, but you’re raising a seed round, you won’t align with their criteria.  

An ideal investor should have experience with companies at your stage and understand the specific challenges you face. 

Our product has both hardware and software so I prefer to seek investors with experience with smart hardware.

We also look for investors who invest in logistics, EdTech, or businesses that have transitioned from offline to online solutions—especially those who have replaced pen and paper or antiquated on-prem solutions. 

We straddle a number of different spheres and any one of those investors could have gotten excited by BusRight.

One of our major investors who led our last round started his own company in college, scaled it to $250M ARR, and took it public in his early thirties. 

His experience in the EdTech space, especially scaling through conferences, parallels much of our own business.

It’s important to find investors who are thematically aligned with your business and who have experience at your stage.

At the end of the day, you don't know where that next investor is going to come from. Some of our most helpful investors have no experience in any of the domains that I just shared.

There's a number of different channels, but one of the most significant for me was leading the Entrepreneurs Club at Northeastern University. 

It's the largest club on campus. We hosted 5 to 6 events every week all year long.

We had several programs such as our semester long pitch competition, the Husky Startup Challenge, and our Tuesday speaker series. 

We brought in investors, operators, and founders. Several hundred folks would show up while we did a fireside chat, interviewed them, and gave them the floor to present.

As the leader of the club I was either interviewing them, leading a fireside chat, or greeting them beforehand.

I’d thank them afterwards, and I'd always send follow-ups. I’d also take down notes as they shared their experiences.

I still use Airtable where I’ve tracked every professional conversation since my sophomore year, which now includes 2,414 entries. 

A lot of these entries came from those early folks that we brought into the Entrepreneurs Club. 

I was able to raise over $1M from these folks that came through the doors of the Entrepreneurs Club.

Those folks are the ones I went to for pitch feedback, fundraising advice, and several of them wrote checks and made valuable introductions. 

I did some cold outreach, but it's incredibly rare for investors to consider anything that's cold. 

I instead leveraged the relationships I built throughout college and combed through their LinkedIn networks.

I'd filter the people in their network by those who had “investor” in their title. And I'd go back to them saying, “hey, I saw you're connected to ABC. Any chance you can make an intro?” 

I would make this request only after I asked them for feedback on the deck, made revisions based on that feedback, and so on. 

To raise $250k, $500k early on, you don't need a thousand people and their networks — you need hopefully 5 or 10.

For our seed round, I remember the day that we closed. Our investor CRM hit 100 rejections. 

These are not email rejections. These are investors that we had a first meeting with. Some were people we’d even met with 5 times — we're talking 400+ meetings. 

Venture operates on the power law. All you need is a few people to say yes. 

But when you're getting berated day after day and really smart people are telling you that there is no place in the world for this company to exist, and this product can't scale, it crushes you. 

We had 10-15 investors in our seed round. 

That’s 100 rejections but that doesn't include the probably 50 others that we were virtually introduced to that said it wasn’t a good fit for them.

There's a lot of people with really good ideas. I believe there are very few people that are out there knocking on doors, building their company brick by brick.

I’m a bit biased but, for us, we went school to school knocking on doors even before we had a product. We just had wireframes but we were selling the vision.

There’s a subset of investors that really leaned in and cared about this grit. They imagined what we could do if they could put some capital behind our ambition.

There's also a class of investors who really like investing in sleepy markets that people aren't paying attention to — I played into that narrative a lot. 

During COVID, school buses weren't on the road. We were sitting there scratching our heads because investors were telling us that K-12 was going remote forever. 

If that was the case then there's no place for in-person brick and mortar education. 

My team was looking at me every day trying to figure out what they were actually doing with their lives and why they were still working here instead of Google making twice as much.

I had to reassure them that the world would eventually open up, and the problems in education would only become more pronounced. 

All these drivers are going to quit, routes would get more complex, and parents’ safety concerns would grow.

I’d tell them our thesis for building this company was only going to be more important. 

As the months went by and it didn't look like schools were going to open up, it was really hard to look in the mirror while fundraising and having to tell the same exact story. 

We ended up using our technology and we pivoted our efforts.

We ultimately routed, tracked, and navigated over $300k worth of goods — from coffee, donuts, and oysters — to several thousand homes, hospitals, community centers across the Northeast.

That showed investors that this team can be super scrappy and the technology might be applicable to other markets as well.

Try to close as much business as fast as you possibly can.

Investors will be more likely to jump on board if they see the available amount left in the round dwindling.

Another strategy I used is to understand an investor’s typical check size. I would tell them a certain amount is available, and I'd share a number in that range.

I also used my travel schedule to my advantage. If you meet with investors in SF, NY, and Boston, and then head back to SF, some people would assume it’s probably a partner meeting.

Where you are in the world can influence how others perceive your fundraising activity.

I want to also note that it’s important to find the right balance between not responding too quickly, but also being diligent in your follow-up and not too delayed. 

My co-founder left 1 week before our fundraising started.

That was during COVID when school buses weren't on the road and our market went to 0 overnight.

My team was asking what they were still doing here. It was definitely tough. We had a month of runway left.

One of our largest customers at the time in New Jersey called me and said that our tablets were smoking and melting on their buses. 

We didn't have the money to replace tablets for our largest customer.

24 hours later, a new investor that was going to lead the round was going to call them to be a customer reference. 

What do you do? You book an Airbnb with a couple of team members at a house in New Jersey in the crawl space where there's spiders and roaches.

We needed to live there because we had no life left if we didn't fix this customer's issues. 

In that house, in the attic, there was an international arms dealer that had his business running out of there.

In the middle of the house you've got these parents with homeschooled children who are talking about shooting people in the lake. We found nine knives in the grass of the house.

Then there’s us in the crawlspace with these tablets that are melting on our largest customer’s buses.

We were trying to close a round that seemingly doesn't exist anymore.

How did we get out of this? We went through people's networks every single day. 

We asked for introductions and eventually hit a super connector with one of our investors, Sahil Lavingia.

He knew a ton of folks out in the Bay Area and made several introductions to us on the first call. He also said that he was going to invest $250k right then and there.

We lived to see another day. That $250k turned into $500k, and then $1M. 

We just kept going and trying to keep a straight face.

We've had certain investors who have said things like, “$350k is nothing to me. I'd much rather see this company go under.”

Another story was when we raised our seed during COVID. It took us 6 to 9 months to close. 

We had 1 month of runway left and were on the verge of finalizing a deal with an investor who was the perfect profile. 

On a Friday afternoon call, as we were wrapping everything up, they abruptly backed out. That was the last time I cried.

Traction is the most important thing.

If there's money on the table — take it. 

During 2 or 3 of our fundraises, we ended up raising a bit more money than planned for. 

In our pre-seed round, we raised $500k against our goal of $250k. During our seed round, we raised $2.5M versus $1.5M. 

People often talk about protecting dilution, especially when the market is more favorable. Looking back, every time we raised more money, it was the reason we’re still in the game. 

While it’s important to be mindful of dilution, the ability to keep going often comes down to cash — it's what allows you to stay in the game and keep winning.

Underscore VC out of Boston. They've been a huge supporter of ours from the get-go. We’ve participated in their summer accelerator. They were our first ever institutional check. 

They've followed through on each financing round. But more importantly, they're an incredible group of people.

I would also add that Long Journey Ventures have been strong supporters as well.

They're the ones who said, “we're going to write you a check and get out of your way.”

When I go back to them and ask them for introductions to their network, they are more than willing. 

I'm reading a book by Richard Branson right now called “Losing My Virginity.” It just shows you how limitless human potential is and how much we can actually endure. 

Every time we deal with one of these challenges, we have no idea how much further we can go.

When you read a book like Super Pumped about the founding story of Uber, and you put yourself in Travis Kalanick's shoes, or even in Richard Branson’s, you realize just how much more we are capable of enduring. 

Tier one investors don't always solve all your problems. 

Don't always get wrapped up in shiny logos. Bring money in the door as quickly as possible.

The opportunity cost of spending more time fundraising to secure a slightly higher valuation or attract brand-name investors does have a huge cost associated with it.