My name is Ulrikke. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Sensorita. 

We founded the company 4 years ago. We are developing technology for waste management companies. 

We’re trying to take an ancient industry into the future with our radar and AI sensors.

We raised a $500k pre-seed round 2 years ago on the Norwegian version of a SAFE note with angels and our incubator in Oslo.

In the deck we had 5 milestones. For us, we have hardware-enabled software, so the first pre-seed round we raised was to develop the core hardware technology.

The round we most recently raised was to deploy that on a large scale while developing new software features and utilize the data from our hardware to build new software modules. 

We have a unit deployment milestone and we have some software product milestones.

Coming from Norway, the startup ecosystem here is not as mature as the Bay Area. 

Because of this I instead decided to raise international capital. My network is mainly in Norway so that was a big decision going into the round as the round sizes are a lot smaller in Norway.

You're expected to compete on an international stage, so why not get the international round sizes and the international network that comes with your investment?

When you're fundraising it's difficult to get in a position where you are the one who gets to choose. 

It's more of the other way where you are trying to be chosen by the investors, especially in the capital market of today. 

We ended up in a situation where we could choose, which was really fortunate.

The decisions we made were based on how well we connected with our contact person and the person who led the deal on the investor's side.

That's the person you're going to report to, who will sit on your board, the person who you will call when shit hits the fan, etc.

You really want to trust that person. We had 2 investors coming in this round and both of our contact people there are people I really connected with and wanted to work with.

One of those investors comes from the build industry as well as the type of waste we work with, and has a vast network there.

They’ve also seen how it is to scale technology in old school industries.

The other one is in the connectivity space. It's actually a CVC, which has its pros and cons. They have some technological expertise that's relevant for our product and can be risk-reducing for us.

I probably did 300 investor meetings, but the funny thing is that the VC that ended up taking the lead was someone I met in person at Slush, the largest startup conference in Europe. 

It was by chance. We were sitting together watching pitches and I started talking to the guy next to me. It turned out he was working at one of the largest construction contractors in Europe.

We remained in touch for 1.5 years and then he started at Brick and Mortar Ventures half a year before we started discussing investment.

It felt like I wasted so much time doing all those investor calls. 

Some of the discussions I had were really great. Even though they ended up not investing, they asked such good questions that really made me think.

Spending time fundraising means that you can spend less time doing other stuff.

It feels like I have been away from the company for half a year.

It's not so strange that the person who invested is the one who's been following our progress for almost 2 years and seen what we have achieved. 

This gives us confidence that we are the right company and that we are the right team to execute on this opportunity.

It’s hard to gain that confidence in video calls over a couple of weeks, especially in the market where investors are a little more risk averse.

I probably did 300 investor meetings and was in touch with 150, most of these being warm intros or meetings at events. 

I didn't do cold outreach to many investors. Many of my first meetings from cold outreach would also go to a second meeting. 

I met with maybe 20 people for more than 3 meetings.

It's different with the Norwegian investors because I've talked to them for years here and there. The ecosystem is so small, so you run into people all the time. 

For international investors it was different and it's also a little harder because you speak to analysts, then you have to work your way up to meet the partner.

When you get to a partner, that’s actually when it really starts. You have to start every call like it’s the first call with a new person. 

I talked to a lot of different investors, VCs, family offices, CVCs, it was pretty broad.

A challenge for us is that very few people know about the waste industry. 

When you hear that a waste company doesn't know how many containers they own and that they lose 1% of the container fleet every year, it's unbelievable that they have so little control. 

It's all these nuances that you have no intuition into understanding how the waste industry works. I spent a lot of time explaining that. 

Our emphasis was that we've had paying customers since before we started the company. I really tried to emphasize that this is not a product trying to find a customer. 

It's something that already has very good traction. Our team is also pretty strong with great CVs.

It's about trying to find the emphasis that makes you unique but, at the end of the day, you're meeting a person with their own presumptions. 

It’s strange because there's a group of people that have to truly believe in what you're saying is true, even if they don't know the industry themselves. 

They have so many other interesting cases, so, at least for a generalist VC, to invest in a market and a problem that you're familiar with, rather than invest in a niche problem that you've never heard of or thought about before.

This means that you get a lot of no's. And the firms that give you the no’s feel they have to give you feedback.

And the feedback is not always something that you should listen to, because you don't know how much thought they put into it. 

But sometimes they can show you what they misunderstood and what they liked, so it's not completely useless.

I tried really hard to do this, but that was difficult.

We were starting to discuss a pilot with a new customer, but we didn't have any capacity to follow up on that immediately because we were also deploying a solution with another customer that requires quite a lot of attention.

Trying to show that we have so much traction that we cannot deliver and that's why we are raising this round, that was my main narrative. 

I also tried to use recruiting. We were talking to really exciting candidates. I’d say that if we didn’t close the round now, that we’d lose them.

I don't know how much this actually worked because investors like to take their time, but I did try to create some sense of urgency.

It's not one single incident, but rather the build-up of rejections you get.

You get rejected so many times and then you have to be able to reset and go into the next meeting with the biggest confidence in the world.

You have to convince this person you don't know that you will take over the world even though you were just rejected 10 minutes ago by an investor you spent a lot of time talking to.

And when you get 200 rejections, that becomes increasingly more difficult. 

We were getting close with Brick and Mortar Ventures, who actually led the round. 

I had really good contact with their European partner but they're quite a small team so I thought there was no way that they would make a decision without at least some of the US partners having met me in person.

I decided to take a chance. We were not actively seeking American investors but I had some calls here and there.

I decided to book a last minute flight to San Francisco and, since it was towards the end of our runway, any expense was risky.

I had a feeling that it was worth the trip because I was going to get the chance to meet a couple of them in person.

It showed an opportunity-seeking mindset. It was right before Christmas, and they ended up investing so the risk paid off.

My advice is to have a couple of founder friends that you can talk to and seek motivation from.

I had a couple of friends who would tell me that I can do it, even if I just got 10 no's that day.

I tried not to involve the rest of the team so much because I didn't want that energy to bleed into other stuff we were doing.

I relied on other people who had been in the exact same situation. That was so critical for me because when you're in the middle of things it can be hard to see past them.

We successfully closed a round where we were in the fortunate position to be able to actually choose our investors. I didn't know that was going to be the case until the very last week. 

When you're in the middle of fundraising, try to set up yourself so that you have the highest chances to have the mental capacity and stamina to push through it and keep going.

For me that was having those two founder friends. It was also going to choir practice every Thursday and dance class every Monday. That's something that’s important to hold onto.

I'm super excited to work with our investors now, Brick and Mortar Ventures and also Telenor, which is a Norwegian telecom company.

I did talk to Gil at Angular Ventures. They ended up not investing, but I had extremely good conversations with them. 

I'm trying to stay in touch with them to ask the difficult questions and make me think.

I have one piece of advice that I got a little too late, but I'm definitely going to do in the next round.

That’s having an ops associate that can help you with fundraising and set up a data room or help you with some of the admin of fundraising.

It’s very time consuming. Hiring a “founder associate” so that you can offload those tasks to someone that really loves the venture game and fundraising game is key.

That's not necessarily a resource but if you find that person, I think that that would be amazing.

The reason why I talked to Gil from Angular Ventures, was because I follow their newsletter and I always enjoy reading it. I’d recommend others read that too.

We're doing hardware. It’s a no-go for many investors, but I think in the future hardware will be more attractive for investors because it has such a strong moat and stickiness factor.

I think hardware startups will see more funding over the next couple of years.