I’m Chase Robbins — CEO of Handle.

We started Handle when I noticed that delivery services weren’t cutting it on college campuses — especially during COVID. 

As a student, I saw firsthand the need for a more convenient shopping option.

That’s when the idea for Handle clicked. We operate "dark stores" right next to college campuses. 

These aren’t traditional stores but hubs where we stock up and from where we quickly deliver convenience store items to students. 

Our whole aim was to make shopping super easy and fast for college students.

In late 2022, we kicked off with our pre-seed round, pulling in $1.1M. $800k came from an angel group and a syndicate of other angels filled in the rest.

Fast forward to Q4 2023, we raised an additional $600k in an extension round. 

This was more like a bridge round, with all the funds coming from our existing investors who wanted to keep the momentum going.

Our first valuation when we raised $1.1M was $7.5M post-money — that was in SAFEs. 

We then raised our most recent round; it was also SAFEs. The highest cap there was $15M. 

We mainly raised at these valuations because we accomplished some key milestones and were running out of runway.

We were opening new markets and hitting new revenue targets.

We wanted to bring more people onto the team, opening new markets, and overall wanted to fund growth.

We wanted investors that were familiar with businesses like ours.

We looked for ones that have funded other college campus-focused startups — as well as those that have similar operating models to ours. 

Investor fit is super important because if the investors are only interested in a certain niche then they won’t be able to help much with a capital-intensive business like ours.

I didn't really know what I was doing when I raised that first round. My strategy was the best — I'll be upfront about that. 

I initially just reached out to anyone I knew who was in venture capital or was a founder. At that point I was more on a fact-finding mission rather than actually trying to raise funds.

I was trying to figure out the basics of fundraising — how much to ask for, what the terms should be, how to set the valuation. 

That was two and a half years ago, and I’ve learned a lot since then.

After having some really good conversations I shifted to mainly using cold email to raise the round. 

I used Crunchbase to research our competitors and other companies with similar operating models to ours — searching for investors that we thought were a good fit.

Once I compiled a large list of funds that were actively investing in similar companies, I sent out roughly 150 cold emails — which eventually helped me secure meetings and raise that first round.

Out of my initial outreach, which included both cold emails and people in my network, we got 42 responses. We landed a good number of meetings from those. 

Out of those, a handful moved forward to more serious talks and due diligence.

We ultimately got 8 commitments from those chats. 

It's interesting to see how many you start with versus how many ultimately get involved.

It was a mix of team and traction. 

We had already generated a significant amount of revenue — in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

We provided strong customer validation for a pre-seed company — which is often pre-revenue and pre-product.

I had already built the product and we had launched.

The bar for us is significantly higher. Understanding the industry dynamics —the level of interest or 'heat' around your sector — is really important in preparing for a raise. 

Understanding the context of the VC world around your industry is really important for gauging how far along you need to be to close a round. 

In our case being in a tough industry means we need substantial revenue just to raise pre-seed funding.

We did all the normal stuff — we overhyped ourselves and talked as if we had many conversations in the works. 

You never want to seem desperate. I don't believe in the gimmicky stuff that I think gets a lot of attention.

There’s a famous story about somebody who would Venmo investors to get their attention and then include a deck link in the notification. 

I think all that stuff is cutesy and will sometimes work — but in general it's a negative signal.

Just go through the normal channels. I would say cold email is not a good way to do it. 

The best channel will always be getting an intro from a founder — especially a portfolio founder. 

That's really the best because they gain nothing if you end up getting a check, and they’re using their reputation for you.

I had to take a lot of meetings — probably 50 to 70 meetings total for the whole round. I don't really like taking meetings — it was a pretty draining experience.

I don't consider myself to be a great fundraiser, and I also don’t like networking — I’m not the type of person who will go to a networking event and chat people up.

That is my biggest weakness as a fundraiser. I have peers who are great at networking and they have expansive networks and they put rounds together in a week or two. 

I would say that I definitely pitch differently than most companies. I pitch in a way that’s very confident — but also realistic.

Investors have a very good bullshit detector. There are exceptions — but they can smell when you’re being unrealistic or inauthentic.

I'm very much the type of person who wants to move quickly, but I also recognize that a lot of our peers have moved too fast and failed because of that. 

I’m very mindful of that, which I think builds reassurance to the investor.

It depends on the founder and what stage they are at. 

But if I could give myself advice — go hard on fund outreach as early as you can — especially if you don’t have a network. 

I’ve developed a network over the past couple of years that will make this round way easier than the first — but the vast majority of first-time founders don't have that network.

I sent out probably 150 emails over 6 months because I made the mistake.

The Guy Kawasaki pitch deck is a great place to start for a lot of founders. YC Startup School has a ton of great resources. 

YC has either an article or a video about pretty much any question that you'll run into as an early stage founder.

Don't overemphasize finding the right tools.

They spend a lot of time trying to build out the perfect Notion dashboard for tracking their fundraise — or they want to just have every tool perfectly configured. 

You can run a round perfectly fine in a Google Sheet and Gmail — that's all you really need.