I’m Brooks — co-founder of RecruitU. 

RecruitU aims to help students navigate high-profile career paths like finance and consulting right out of undergrad by facilitating seamless experiences between students and companies.

My co-founder and I both went through the investment banking recruiting process — my co-founder worked in banking at Barclays for a year.

We both experienced firsthand how challenging it is to find the necessary resources to land roles in investment banking, and that this problem is common amongst basically all students — even those in consulting or general finance.

We first raised around a year ago through a SAFE note from friends and family, along with strategic investors from the finance world — from IB and PE.

We raised $1M to launch our product — mainly using funds for engineering and product. 

Around December we decided that we wanted to raise another round. We set a goal to raise $1M but ended up closing $2.2M.

We decided to raise more because we needed to double down on product.

Our software engineers are on a contract basis — we could have cut some costs and shifted our focus to sales. 

But for the time we’d been in the market we realized that our product had a pretty strong edge.

The right strategy was to continue to build it to become enterprise ready for clients the following recruiting cycle.

The goal for this round was primarily about gaining legitimacy and establishing ourselves as a serious player in the space. We’re planning to do a rebrand and polish our product.

Our biggest competitor is Handshake — they recently raised $200M at a valuation of $3.5B. 

We view Handshake as the Chevrolet of the industry — it's widely accessible and has a good use case for both students and companies.

However, securing top jobs through Handshake isn’t easy as they only have an “apply” button. We believe this is what can be improved on. 

We’re creating an informal process around that — which is 1% of the process of finding a job. 

We are building a platform for the 99% of things you need to do before you hit apply.

The biggest thing was that they needed to be in high finance — think banking, private equity, or consulting — or working in enterprise SaaS or recruiting. 

If they had one or two things in their background that showed they were already interested in our area, they were potential candidates to reach out to.

We also really leaned into the networks we'd been building since the summer of 2021. 

That's when my co-founder first went through the recruiting process that sparked the idea for our company. 

I jumped in a few months later and we quickly realized we needed some capital.

We bootstrapped with $80k of my co-founder's and my savings while also taking out a loan to get things moving before we even looked for our first round of serious funding. 

By the time we started raising funds we had been building this momentum for about three years — it just kept snowballing.

We realized early on that we were probably too early for early-stage VCs and thought it would be a struggle to get the valuation we wanted — so we decided not to pursue that route.

We instead explored the family office route. Throughout this whole process my co-founder and I have been super proactive about networking — always meeting people even when we’re not fundraising. 

We ended up networking with family offices in places like New York and Austin — much of it felt random at times. 

It was a lot of phone calls asking if they knew someone who might be interested — while maintaining good relationships regardless of the outcome. 

This strategy really paid off even though the first month was pretty slow.

We eventually connected with a few key strategic investors with really strong networks. 

These people were not only interested in our business but helped a lot in bringing on more investors.

Our initial outreach was to around 45 investors. From there we got 20 first meetings — 9 ended up investing.

We were pretty selective with who we wanted to talk with because we wanted investors who added value — it wasn’t a spray and pray to all early-stage VCs that do HR tech or enterprise SaaS.

It was selling the problem that we were trying to solve and creating the right story.

We both went through this recruitment process through investment banking, and we have a unique student perspective of how challenging it is.

We'd also attracted a sizable amount of early users.

We also pitched the team — we have a group of engineers that are world-class. 

They're ex-Google, MIT engineers — the main guy dropped out of MIT during his sophomore year and went to Y Combinator. 

The engineering prowess behind this was a big selling point.

We also sold the impact we could have. There are a lot of talented recruits out there who don’t have the kind of access that well-off students might have. 

We also sold that we’d have a great impact on that student's career from early on — everyone should be getting shots at these top jobs because they can change your life. 

We really leaned into that angle of our story.

We thought through our approach to building momentum by being smart about who we reached out to first. 

We originally aimed to raise $1M but as the commitments rolled in, we bumped our target up to $1.5M.

After talking to an investor we even toyed with the idea of going up to $3M if the investor was a great fit to propel our business forward.

It made more sense to start with a realistic goal and scale up if things went well — rather than shooting for the moon right out of the gate and potentially falling short.

This strategy really worked for us. As we got early commitments we would say, "Hey, we're already getting close to our goal." 

That really spurred more interest. Our early investors also helped a ton by suggesting others who might want to get in on the action. 

It turned into a bit of a snowball effect where each new commitment helped gather more. 

It was all about making our initial backers feel like winners driving our momentum and helping us reach — and even exceed — our fundraising goals.

One of the biggest challenges we faced during this fundraising was really nailing down what our company is all about. 

As we went through the process our mission evolved. Initially we thought we'd focus on helping finance students land jobs — with companies footing the bill. 

As we delved deeper we realized there was a much larger issue to tackle if we wanted to stand out in this competitive landscape.

Pitching to companies always brought up comparisons, like, "What about Handshake?" 

That forced us to think hard about what makes us different from the big players. It wasn't easy being a lean startup trying to beat out more established competitors.

We didn't fully realize what set us apart until well into the fundraising process.

My co-founder and I, we’re open to change — we thrive on user feedback from both students and companies.

We now know that it’s our mission that sets us apart — especially when things change rapidly at such an early stage.

If you're not pivoting or adjusting, you'd need a once-in-a-lifetime idea with instant product-market fit — that's rare.

Start building your network early and lean into it. 

Don’t wait until you need money to start reaching out. 

Start connecting with people in your industry, attend events, engage on LinkedIn, and make those genuine connections way ahead of time.

When it comes time to raise, these relationships are gold. They’ll provide you with warm introductions to potential investors and add credibility to your pitch. 

Be smart about who you approach first. Kick off with those who are likely to commit early — they can create a snowball effect that makes it much easier to close checks later on.

We’ve used Y Combinator's SAFE agreements for our fundraising, and Carta has been our go-to for all things valuations. 

Carta’s been a game changer — whenever an investor has doubts about our numbers, we show them Carta’s reports. 

In addition, Peter Walker’s content on LinkedIn is super helpful. He talks a lot about fundraising strategy and valuations.