Raising at pre-seed is unlike any other stage of fundraising. You don’t yet have metrics that can prove the business. Often, there’s no finished product, no customers paying real money, sometimes not even a clear business model. And yet, this is when investors make their most difficult bets — backing a vision long before it has taken shape.
The founders who succeed here understand something essential: pre-seed is not about showing how much you’ve built, but about showing that what you’re building deserves to exist.
The Weight of the Team
When investors back a pre-seed startup, they are really backing people. There isn’t enough data to analyze, so the founders become the dataset. Execution history, resilience, and founder-market fit matter more than any slide in the deck.
Investors ask: Do these founders have the grit to survive the ugly middle? Do they know the problem well enough to see opportunities others will miss? That’s why stories about personal connection to the problem carry weight. A former banker building a tool to fix the exact inefficiencies they once lived through. A doctor automating the paperwork they lost hours to every week. These aren’t just narratives; they are signals that the team won’t abandon the mission at the first setback.
Vision Over Features
At pre-seed, features don’t convince investors. Markets do. A long feature list can even hurt, because it suggests the founder hasn’t yet identified what really matters. What investors lean into is the scale of the opportunity and the sharpness of the founder’s vision.
The most credible decks at this stage spend little time on “what we’ve built so far” and much more on “where this is going.” The ambition is what investors need to see. Not blind ambition, but a credible, expansive view of what could be unlocked if the problem is solved. That’s why even the smallest traction signal — ten engaged users, one letter of intent, a waitlist with real names — can change the whole conversation. These tiny proof points act as bridges between a founder’s big vision and the messy reality of execution.
Traction That Matters
The temptation is to inflate traction: screenshots of polished dashboards, vanity download numbers, social media buzz. But seasoned investors know the difference between noise and signal. They look for evidence that someone outside the founder’s circle cares enough to lean in.
That evidence could be a pilot program, a customer who emails unprompted feedback, a prototype that gets shared without marketing spend. It doesn’t need to be scale; it needs to be proof that the pain point is real and the solution resonates.
One fintech founder recently told us that their biggest breakthrough wasn’t the launch of their app, but the first inbound email from a small credit union asking if they could pilot it. To most outsiders, that looked like nothing. To investors, it looked like everything: real pull from the market.
The Logic of the Business
Even in the earliest rounds, investors want to see a path — not a forecast spreadsheet, but a believable story of how this becomes a business. That means founders must show they’ve thought about how money moves, where margins could come from, and what levers will eventually scale growth.
No one expects precise CAC or LTV figures at pre-seed. What they expect is coherence: that the founders understand the mechanics of the industry they’re entering, and that they’ve avoided assumptions that collapse on first contact with reality.
Clean Structure, Clear Signals
The unspoken test at pre-seed is whether the deal itself is investable. A messy cap table, unclear IP ownership, or bloated burn rate are red flags that can kill a round regardless of vision or team strength. By contrast, a clean structure signals discipline — a founder who knows the difference between chaos and calculated risk.
Why This Matters
Pre-seed investing is full of paradoxes. Investors know the numbers don’t exist yet, but they still need proof. They know the product isn’t finished, but they want to see users leaning in. They know the model will change, but they want confidence that the logic holds.
What they’re really buying is conviction. Conviction that the team will persist. Conviction that the market is real. Conviction that the early signals, small as they are, point toward something bigger.
For founders, the lesson is simple but not easy: don’t confuse activity with validation. Don’t try to overwhelm with features, metrics, or noise. Instead, focus on what’s hardest to fake — the authenticity of your connection to the problem, the clarity of your vision, and the signals of demand that only the market can provide.
That’s what investors are looking for at pre-seed. Not polish, not perfection — but proof that you’re building something the world won’t let you ignore.
