We are looking for companies with traction, scalable business models and founders with skin-in-the game.
If you just have an idea and a Business Plan and/or your are not working full time on the business (unless you already created and sold a previous startup), don’t bother applying for funding with us or any other VC investors, this will be a waste of your and our time. Perhaps you can consider a pre-seed acceleration program like our partners from the Founders Institute and get the traction that you need.
Before you apply for funding please make sure that you have ALL these:
- Team – Formed and fully committed team that can show skin-in-the game (you need to show us that you will feel more pain than us if the baby-project fails and you have more motivation that it actually succeeds).
- Market – Big enough market and a scalable business model + specific plans to internationalize your business, showing convincing willingness to actually execute them.
- Exit – realistic exit plan for your investors and your clear personal goals with this scenario.
- Traction – sales, contracts, growing user base, built product/prototype that is validated by real customers. Participating in acceleration programs, startup competitions and having Facebook page likes is good but it’s not the traction we will count.
- Co-investors – This is not a must for application but you should know that our fund has a mandate to always co-invest with other private investors, so if you already have found at least half of the money , that will immediately hone our attention. If not, but we still like your project, we will have together find the other half.
Please, note that we are reviewing hundreds of projects and it is impossible to give feedback to all of you as we will only provide it to those we have had meaningful interaction with.
Our process is simple, once we review your application on our platform (don’t send us mail, just follow the steps in the link) we might invite you to meet and start from there.
You can check our detailed criteria here and apply directly by sending us a mail to: milen@sofiaventures.eu