Mind The Gap: Out of 100 seed funded enterprise software companies, only around 25 raise an A round - a 75% mortality rate ⚰️ It takes an average of 18 months to go from seed to Series A but the energy deployed is monumental. And lots of startups struggle to get the metrics investors are looking for to invest in an A round. This jump is strenuous -- What are the best practices you should absolutely build to increase your resilience? How do you adapt to this new phase of development? By Andy Leaver (https://twitter.com/AndyLeaver): Partner at Crane Venture Partners (https://crane.vc/), a £60M London-based fund looking for deeply technical founders building intelligent enterprise software, backing companies at the pre-series A stage all across Europe.

1. The VC Roadshow -
Avoid Being in the 75%

2. 2
My Journey - 5 startups to IPO as 1st VP International

3. Crane invests into Intelligent Computing
companies addressing the enterprise

4. 4
Our portfolio of 20 deeply technical companies

5. 5
The typical ratio of enterprise startups that make it from
startup to seed to SeriesAin Europe every year
c25
100
Incubators
Accelerators
Spin-outs
Pre-funded
Startups
Seed Rounds
>$500k
Series A Rounds
>$5m
100’s

6. ICON
What are the most common
mistakes founders make?
• Don’t iterate often enough to focus on what
customers are telling them
• Fail to build an early sales process to
double down on early customer wins
• Scale up an expensive commercial team (VP
Sales etc) prematurely

7. • Spending too much time with large corporate “Innovation Teams” who are not your buyer!
• You’re probably not charging enough to your first customers
• Not listening for upsell opportunities
• Want the product to be 100% perfect
• Many startups are not product led - they’re giving away too many services early on
What else I’ve learned from our own portfolio

8. Customer Centricity

9. Know what investors are looking for. “Seed is a phase.”
Angel Seed Late/Post Seed
- Raising up to $1m
- Raising on a pitch deck
- Pre-product
- Raising up to $1-2m
- Up to c$20-50k MRR
- Handful of reference accounts
- Raising $2-4m
- >$50k MRR
- On or nearing product/market
- Early repeatable sales
- One or two upsells
- Need to hit 1-3 key milestones
to unlock a Series A

10. crane.vc
Persons Name
Job Title
yourname@crane.vc
+44 (0) 123 456 789
Persons Name
Job Title
yourname@crane.vc
+44 (0) 123 456 789
Persons Name
Job Title
yourname@crane.vc
+44 (0) 123 456 789
Persons Name
Job Title
yourname@crane.vc
+44 (0) 123 456 789
Thank you
crane.vc
Thank you!!
@andyleaver