My name is Logan Currie and I am the co-founder and COO of The ApplyAI — an AI career coach that helps students and job seekers increase their chances of finding jobs.

We also help them build a career IP vault that shows the big picture of their skills and stories. If you tell your story to The ApplyAI every 2 weeks, you will never have to write a resume again.

This is the second company that I have founded with my co-founder Vrijen Attawar. I have been a career coach for over 15 years and have been looking for ways to scale that service.

We recently raised an angel round of $1M at a $7.5M valuation from a single angel investor.

That closed in mid-April 2024 — It’s the second round we’ve raised. In total, we have raised $1.25M since we began in June of 2023.

We had raised an initial friends and family round of $250k in June of 2023 and we got to a point where we had hiring and product development needs that would ramp up our burn rate. 

Because of that we decided to start conversations in the Fall of 2023.

We considered going to an institutional investor, but we did not feel we were far enough along to go through a relatively more intense process. 

We instead showed our product to an angel investor who got to see a demo — that was enough for them to commit.

We raised enough to give us another 12 to 18 months of runway based on the forecasted burn rate. 

We did not want to raise too much this early from a single angel investor, so we tried to strike the right balance.

We wanted to have enough money to extend our runway and hire some technical personnel since my co-founder and I are non-technical. 

We considered raising less than the $1M — with our current burn rate we could have done well with just $500-800k.

We had an opportunity to hire a very talented technical person and we believed it was the right decision to raise more to be able to hire them.

We are in the HR tech/EdTech space so we mostly focus on VCs who are focused on those areas. 

With that being said, it can be a mistake to stay too narrow early on, so we have made sure to send updates to more industry-agnostic VCs as well.

We want to find the right balance of getting in front of a good variety of investors, while making sure what we have to share with them is relevant.

We have relied on our advisors to guide us on which investors to send investor updates to.

We try to cater the information we share with them to their interests and then extend those updates into longer conversations.

We have spoken to 60-80 VCs at this point.

Of those, we have a wish list of about 20-30 that we’d like to continue the conversation with.

Our strategy is to pitch our company as having a high-quality founding team that is well-positioned to take advantage of the prevailing macro trends in the job market.

We have a combined 25 years of experience in the career coaching space and know the industry very well. 

Our product is essentially translating that knowledge into an AI tool that will help younger generations navigate a potentially more disruptive job market.

The average job tenure is down and dropping — applying to jobs is a new skill in itself.

AI is likely to accelerate that process so that helped with the “why now”.

The money getting bogged down by regulators caused us to worry about making payroll.

It is something that you know conceptually, but is so much tougher when you live it.

The due diligence piece can be a very slow process as well.

It is best for founders to assume that the money will take longer than you expect. 

There are stories of money being wired in 2 weeks, but founders should plan for the opposite.   

Another big challenge was that neither my co-founder nor I had a technical background. We were at quite a disadvantage when it came to the talent portion. 

This has been a theme throughout our journey as YC has denied us twice because of the hard requirement that a company needs a technical founder.

The process with the latest round took 7 months. 

The angel made the decision to invest quicker than that, but they were located in India, so the money had to go through 2 different sets of regulators to reach our bank account.

The key to resolving the issue was our legal team at Gunderson — they are a firm that works with founders and early stage startups. They do not charge you until you raise money. 

We also had to make sure that the details around our SAFE transfer were precise. It is a standardized process in the US, but not as much internationally. 

We had to get the documents right in English and Hindi.

Founders should make a list of investors they want to pitch and put them into tiers: A-list, B-list, and C-list. 

They should practice their pitch on the people they are less worried about making mistakes in front of, so when they get to the A-list investors, they will be sharp. 

This will also help you get used to being ghosted and rejected.

Also do the fundraising earlier than you think you need to. 

That feeling of understanding that payroll is due, and then needing to find the money from somewhere to get it done is pretty much the worst feeling that exists. 

The fundraising process will take longer than you think it will. To go with this, ‘they say’ to do your fundraising process 3-6 months before you run out of money.

YC and First Round Capital have a lot of good resources.

I would also recommend using DocSend. It allows you to see which of your slides are getting the most viewing time and that can give you good information for your next pitch.