Lifting multiple rounds of investment capital may be a mistake to start your operation

There is a generally acceptable text in Silicon Valley: Determining the Starting Partition Frag this. Sell part of your company to raise investment capital. Make sales. Raise more investment capital, and make more sales. Repeat until the company is exposed to the public, or is obtained, and we hope that the billions are in both cases.

But what if you did not get a running device to collect donations after doing the first round? What if you organized your company on the enemy to profitability through a slower and sustainable growth, rather than the reverse growth-unbalanced-as do many VC companies?

This is the question that Pukar Hamal, founder and CEO of Securitypal AI asked, after collecting a $ 21 million tour in 2021, and a year later, almost money ran out. The tour led the crafts projects David Sachs, with the participation of Andrink Horwatz Martin Cassado and the founder of Octa Frederick Crest.

He said: “The company started again in March 2020. It is my second company that I founded.” On PodCast Techcrunch’s Equity this week.

He said that his previous company, which was sold through a acquisition process, raised its first capital before the products of the product market. This is very common. The founders often raise before they get a product that they know will pay well.

In the past, Hamal described this decision as a major “mistake”.

So for safety, do the opposite. Wait until the company reached one million dollars, which lasted about a year, then raised the first and only, the series A.

Securitypal AI is used to accelerate the due care of safety, which occurs in every large institution treatment when signing new IT contracts. Securitypal is to reduce security review from months to days or even hours, which helps companies save money on the process while closing the deals faster. It has customers with a big name like Aartable, Figma, Langchain and Grammarly, among others.

But in 2022, he faced a crisis. Interest rates have increased and the investment capital market is disrupted. Raising more money will be difficult. “We were burning a lot of capital,” he said. “We were, like, 14 months away from the money running out.”

It was an invitation to wake up. Hamal was to cut the expenses significantly, which means that large workers are demobilized. He said that was very painful, even pledged to do things differently. He said: “We have extended our runway, and we tried to lead the company towards a cash flow, even a positive profitability of the cash flow.”

Although VC funds in 2025 flow again, especially for the emerging companies of artificial intelligence, “we did not raise another round,” he said. the reason? He now sees that VC money comes at its own price.

He said: “The more the capital we raise, the more expectations, the more we will get control of the company, the greater the pressure we feel to employ a group of people who may not succeed.”

“For investment capital, what matters is growth,” he said. For some investors, the growth of rapid revenue is more important than improving the total margins.

This means that the company can decrease deeper in red until it sells more. VCS confidence that founders will discover profitability at a later time. Until then, they can continue to raise money. If they cannot, the company may not survive.

Hamal wanted what he described as “solid growth” for Securitypal: slow and steel. If sales are limited to a handful of publishing operations at any specific time, his team can ensure that all customers have been well placed, even for their edge cases.

He didn’t only want quick sales because customers were not using the product and Churn comes at the time of renewal. “This story occurs all the time because there is a lot of pressure on companies to grow,” he said.

On the other hand, he said that he found that Slow Arr could lead to “healthy wild margins, a great cash set.”

Hamal is clear that he does not defend investment capital. Other startups may have to continue to raise and chase ARR quickly. It does not exclude even another tour of Securitypal. He just wants to think of more founders of slow -growing alternatives.

He said: “I raised the investment capital. I did not raise it again because what I am trying to do is the work situation in a situation in which it does not need the investment capital over and over again.”

Listen to the entire conversation on Podcast stocksWhich includes Hamal’s suggestions on how to find capital outside the project.