My name is Mo Aziz and I am the CEO and founder of Pluto. 

Pluto is a spend management platform designed for enterprises to manage all of their expenses, smart corporate cards and end-to-end accounts payable. 

Our automation software allows financial controllers & CFOs to automatically manage and enforce their budgets while ensuring that employees have an easy way to spend and maintain audit records after approvals.

We’re focused on businesses in the UAE and the broader region.

We raised a seed round of $6M at a $30M post-money valuation. The process took 5 weeks from start to finish.

I had done over 75 customer discovery calls after the initial idea for the business. 

There are a lot of similar companies serving other regions, but that next-generation payment infrastructure was still lacking in the UAE.

I had deep conviction that it was the right time to start this business (December 2021). 

The private capital markets were very active at that time, so we decided to raise as much as we could – double what we had originally determined we would need.

Unlike in the US, the financial infrastructure in the region is not very commoditized. We had to invest a meaningful amount of capital putting it into place for ourselves and our customers.

We broke our investors into 3 buckets: 

We first looked for investors that could help us with enablement. That meant navigating regulations, licensing, and the whole intersection of payments and government in the UAE. 

We then looked for investors that could help us with distribution. 

In my previous startup in the FinTech space, having investors that can help you reach customers and form partnerships was a massive benefit. 

Some of our first customers became investors as well.

The other things we looked for were investors who were also highly seasoned founders, especially if they were founders in FinTech. There is nothing like having an advisor who has been there before.

We started with warm leads in our own network. I had been in touch with a lot of investors and operators in the FinTech space. 

COVID sped up the process because people had more time on their hands to network. I started with a good group of people to reach out to first.

We had a very clear list of investors we would want to work with and from there, just focused on getting a warm intro to each of them. 

Rather than being introduced to investors for money, we were being introduced to the right partners to help us execute.

I also recorded a short video of myself doing the pitch and would share that with investors who we could not get a meeting with. It was used to asynchronously fundraise.

We spoke to over 100 investors and about 45 to 50 led to due diligence. 

Our biggest advantage when talking to investors was emphasizing the strength of our team. 

We have founders with experience building financial infrastructure at Square, PayPal, Amazon, and Google.

The second element we relied on was the momentum in the space at the time. Ramp was having a lot of success and we could bill ourselves as the Ramp of the UAE.

Investors want validation without it being obvious that you, as the founder, are giving it to them. They want to feel like they have discovered you and saw the opportunity. 

The order in which you reach out to investors is key.

We started with only angels at first because we believed they were easier to close. Once you have angel investors on board, it becomes easier for institutional investors to commit.

After we had commitment from angel investors, we reached out to VCs and told them what we were working on and that we did not need money.

This prompted some of them to get excited and join in earlier than they normally would’ve.

One group of VCs that showed interest told the rest of our target list — it set off a bidding war. That led to us getting very favorable terms and much more capital than we thought we needed.

We raised funds during one of the hottest private capital market environments in recent memory. 

This made fundraising a lot easier. Once the markets contracted, we were put in a tough situation where our next round might be diminished, despite our business success.

Investors have become a lot more conservative. 

This is especially tough for our type of business because the standard playbook is to burn cash to build market share — that is a lot more difficult to accomplish when markets are tighter.

There was a period before we started raising that I was reading a lot of newsletters by people like Packy McCormick and Mario Nawal.

The most important thing a first-time founder needs when fundraising is confidence. 

When founders let themselves get intimidated, their high conviction dream can turn into a low conviction idea, just because they deliver it poorly.

If you think there is a chance your energy will be low or you are not feeling great about the meeting, try to reschedule. It’s a sales call and high energy is very important.

It is easier to recover from the inconvenience of a reschedule than a bad first impression.