The RoundDrop Blog
Notes from the first check
Insights on fundraising, building, and backing the next wave of pre-seed and seed companies.
Know Who's Across the Table
Angels, seed funds, the Series alphabet, institutions, PE, and the syndicates in between. Every one writes a different check, for a different reason. Here's who's actually sitting across from you, seat by seat.
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You Can't Negotiate a Term You Can't Define
The five pillars of fundraising terms every pre-seed founder should know before the first call, explained in plain English, with the lines that quietly cost you the most: SAFEs, caps, dilution, the option pool shuffle, and pro rata.
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Cold-Emailing Investors Works. It Just Rarely Works for You.
Cold email to investors sits at a 1–5% reply rate and roughly 0% conversion to capital from cold inbound. Here's the honest math, where cold email genuinely works, and what we built RoundDrop to be instead.
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Q1 2026 VC Valuations: What Pre-Seed and Seed Founders Should Take From It
Seed valuations for AI and non-AI are nearly identical ($18.7M vs $18.0M median). The premium kicks in at Series A, where AI now commands an 84% markup and the median pre-money has tripled since 2020. A short read on PitchBook's Q1 2026 report.
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Why We Built RoundDrop
74% of startup shutdowns are pre-seed or seed companies. Founders pitch 58 investors on average before closing, and still get ghosted 75% of the time. Here's why we built something different.
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