I’m Siddharth and I'm the Co-founder and CEO of Dresma. 

Dresma was started as a way of helping online sellers create all the content needed to be online. 

This includes everything from marketplace listings and storefront images, to text content, and social media posts. Our platform allows them to create all of this quickly.

The company was started in the summer of 2020, we've raised one round so far — a $3M seed round back in November of 2021.

We were bootstrapped for about 2 years, focusing on building out the product.

We also built out a fairly good revenue stream. We were running at about $600k annualized revenue when we raised our round.

It was roughly about 50% for the development of building out the product roadmap. 

40% went toward GTM activities and the last 10% went towards infrastructure admin. 

When we raised the initial funding, we were primarily focused on doing listing and marketplace images so the user would have access to a wide image processing platform.

The primarily use of the funds was towards building out the creative imagery piece of the entire journey. 

Once you have product images in place, you usually want to create other creative assets such as Instagram posts or higher engagement marketplace content such as infographics. 

We created libraries of templates that you could place your product into. 

Later in the journey, when generative AI came into the picture, we built tools to transform product listing images into ones with lifestyle backgrounds and model images.

We also use LLMs to create all the titles, descriptions, captions and text content for marketplace listings as well.

We were very clear that we wanted investors that were previous operators. As we all know, entrepreneurship has much uncertainty and it's good to have people that have experienced it in the past. 

The second thing we were looking for was somebody located in our primary target market: North America. 

We were ideally looking for a venture fund in the US that had some experience with the go-to-market activities needed to succeed in that market.

Our founding board member is a veteran of Silicon Valley. He has previously sold four startups.

He's very well-connected in that ecosystem and has helped us setup initial meetings. He’s also helped us through the pitch deck creation and the positioning of the company. 

It really helped having an insider in that ecosystem.

We initially pitched investors in India and then in the US. 

It's changed quite a lot but around 3 years ago, the venture capital ecosystem in India was still fairly nascent. There also weren’t many operators that had become VCs.

The investors were primarily financial people and they were largely unwilling to bet on new business models.

They were looking at localizing copycat solutions that had worked in China or the U.S. Because we didn't really fit their desired criteria and it was difficult going. 

We did a lot of cold outreach in India and did some in the US, but most conversations stemmed from warm introductions in the U.S.

In India we probably reached out to around 50 VCs. We got in front of maybe 15 to 18, but none of these resulted in term sheets. 

In the U.S., we probably met with 20 to 25 VCs and secured meetings with about half of them. We ended up receiving 2 term sheets in the U.S.

Fundraising through COVID worked in our favor. The only outreach you could do in that time was virtual outreach, and that in some sense helped.

We also timed the market well. I do recognize that those were good years from a fundraising perspective. Timing is everything in business.

We had a good Head of Revenue, and had secured some key accounts in place. Because of this, investors were fairly confident that we had a valuable solution for customers. 

The market fit may not have been validated completely, but there was some traction, which helped significantly.

The second thing that helped during the second half of our fundraise was that we had a fairly good demo in place. 

We have a visual product, so being able to show somebody how easy it was to use was key.

Fortunately, we did not have to. The time it took from the first meeting with our lead investor to closing our round was only 3 to 4 weeks. 

We were lucky that our lead investor had a co-investor already in place.

We had also been speaking to a syndicate fund in Singapore prior to the term sheet. They were ready to invest, but couldn’t lead the round.

So once we had the term sheet from the lead, the syndicate came on board fairly quickly.

The challenges in India with a less prominent venture ecosystem were real. It was simply a bad fit for the existing ecosystem at that time.

In the US, the key challenge when pitching to investors was defining a moat.

That was something that we had to crystallize as it was a main concern of many investors.

It was very clear to investors that the market opportunity existed and that there was a business that could be built in our space, but the existence of a defensible moat wasn’t clear.

Find a personal connection to network into the VC ecosystem. That's key to securing the right meetings.

Once you have the meeting in place, transparency is everything. It's very important to have those conversations as early in the dialogue as possible.

The last thing you want is to get into due diligence efforts, and only then have concerns come up. It wastes time, becomes a confrontational environment, and it makes it less likely you’ll receive the investment.

I can't recommend our current group morel, they're extremely supportive investors.

Inventus Capital Partners is our lead investor. The great thing about them is they're all operators. They've founded and sold multiple companies, and done IPOs as well.

It really helps to have that pedigree on the board as your partners in this journey. That's really key for long-term success. 

NFX has a tool called Signal that lets you know not only which venture firms exist, but also details as to who the partners are, what their interest fields are, and what check sizes they write.

Doing that homework early on will save you a lot of time and effort in identifying the right people. If you're logged into Signal, it also shows you how you're connected to those people.

Upfront prep is very important. It's vital to understand a venture capitalist's perspective and why they would invest in you. You need to build your story from that perspective.

Founders are often product builders and focus on seeing the world through that lens. It's really important to invert that lens and understand what the venture capitalist is looking for in the pitch.

If you build out the story from that perspective from the beginning, it saves a lot of time and effort and answers a lot of the questions the VCs will have.