Andrew Jamison's journey from corporate life to founding Extend, detailing how he successfully raised a $250K seed round to address.
Andrew Jamison's journey from corporate life to founding Extend, detailing how he successfully raised a $250K seed round to address gaps in modern spend and expense tools for SMBs.
I guess you guys have raised about 70 million uh to date. What has been also the journey of going through the financing cycles too? we were off. Uh and that was that was obviously a huge milestone. But I forgot one piece actually in terms of what the expectation from investors is. And this was a learning was as someone coming out of a large corporate totally unknown force in the world of of entrepreneurship. And so there was kind of a mandate actually that they wanted you to raise money from friends and family before you even got to the venture capital. And that was a bit like cool we know you did well in corporate but you actually have people here who would back you into doing your own venture. And so we we actually went and raised 250,000. We had 10 people put in checks for for 25K uh from across right different uh parts of the industry, different parts of the world um to give us
credibility but also help us to build the MVP a fully functioning MVP where we could take a virtual card and go and make a purchase in a shop with a card number on our phone uh and actually prove that the solution worked by the time we got to 72. And that was another another learning, right, which is this aspect of trust that the investors wanted to see as a sort of stepping stone to actually them putting in three million bucks and say, "Okay, let's let's go build this Increase.