Why We Built RoundDrop

Vishal Vivek spent five years and 106 investor rejections before his biomaterials startup, Ukhi, closed a $1.2 million pre-seed round.

He wasn’t pitching a bad idea. He wasn’t a bad founder. He was pitching solo, and investors kept asking the same question in different ways: who else is on your team? The moment he brought on a co-founder with deep operational experience, the conversations changed immediately. One structural fix, visible through a different lens, unlocked what five years of grinding couldn’t.

That story isn’t rare. It’s closer to the norm.

The Numbers Are Worse Than You Think

The average successful seed round involves pitching 58 investors before the first check clears. Sub-10% conversion rates are standard even for strong teams. For pre-seed, only 2 out of every 100 startups that seek funding actually receive it.

Three to six months. That’s how long it takes from first pitch to money in the bank, if things go well. If they don’t, you keep going. Or you shut down.

And a lot of founders shut down. In 2024, 966 U.S. startups closed, a 25.6% increase over 2023. The most common cause: running out of cash before closing a round. 74% of those shutdowns were pre-seed or seed companies.

That’s not a product problem. That’s a process problem.

What Founders Are Actually Up Against

Talk to any first-time founder who’s been through a raise, and you’ll hear the same story underneath the specifics.

You spend weeks building a target list in a spreadsheet pulled from three different databases, all with slightly different data, none of which tells you who’s actually writing checks right now. You send cold emails into the void. You get ghosted. 75% of founders report being ghosted by investors they were actively in conversations with. You track everything in a Notion doc that gets out of date the moment you update it. You send deck links you can’t track. You lose sight of which investors have passed and which are just slow.

Celine Halioua, now CEO of Loyal, documented her seed raise in detail. As a first-time, female, solo founder raising for a biotech moonshot in January 2020, she talked to 65 investors in 1.5 months and had an 11% hit rate. The first 80% of her $5.1M round filled in two weeks. The last 20% took three more weeks, with a two-week stretch in there where not one person converted, even though she had every structural advantage: a VC background, an Oxford PhD, and a former fund that had already invested. Even so, almost every investor challenged her valuation, even though male-led companies at the same stage were raising at the same terms without facing the same scrutiny.

If it was that hard for her, imagine what it’s like for the founder without the network.

The Current Tools Weren’t Built for This

The tools that exist today were built for a different era or a different type of company entirely.

Done-with-you outreach services are powerful. They use live investor signals and AI to run your campaigns. But they cost more than a pre-seed founder’s monthly burn and they take the wheel away from you. They’re built for founders raising $1M+ who can afford to outsource. Matching platforms like Cherub get you a connection and then step back. Generic CRMs like Folk were built for sales teams and retrofitted for fundraising. Investor databases like OpenVC give you names but no signal on who’s actively writing checks.

A growing number of founders have simply opted out. The “seed-strapping” trend (raising a small seed and immediately building toward profitability rather than chasing follow-on VC) is accelerating precisely because the traditional path has become too slow, too opaque, and too expensive to navigate. CNBC covered the trend in 2025, framing it as a direct response to a difficult funding environment.

Every tool solves one slice of the fundraise. Nobody owns the whole process. So founders are left stitching together five tools, a spreadsheet, a DocSend link, and a prayer.

The Four Failures We Set Out to Fix

1. Discovery is manual and random. There’s no way to know which investors are actively writing checks right now, in your sector, at your stage. You’re cross-referencing outdated databases and cold emailing into uncertainty.

2. The CRM is a spreadsheet. There’s no pipeline kanban built for fundraising stages, no follow-up reminders, no way to see at a glance where each relationship actually stands.

3. There’s no home base for your round. When investors want to review your materials, you’re sending them to a DocSend link, a Google Drive folder, a Notion page, and sometimes a personal website you built in a weekend. None of it is cohesive. None of it signals that you run a tight operation.

4. The relationship dies after the wire. Once a round closes, the connection between founders and their investors atrophies. Updates go into a BCC email. The angel who just wrote a $25K check, who could become an advisor, a customer, a connector to your Series A, goes quiet.

What We Built Instead

RoundDrop is the fundraising platform for pre-seed and seed founders, and the investors who back them.

It starts with a pitch page: a hosted deal room that lives at the center of your raise. Not a PDF link. Not a Notion doc. A purpose-built page that tells your story, houses your materials, and gives investors everything they need to say yes.

On top of that, an investor matching engine that surfaces who’s actually active. It pulls live deal signals, filters by sector and check size, and ranks investors by how likely they are to engage. The matching gets smarter with every raise on the platform.

A pipeline CRM built specifically for fundraising, with kanban stages that are “Identified,” “Reached Out,” “In Conversation,” “Due Diligence,” and “Committed.” Not “Lead,” “Opportunity,” “Close.”

Warm intro detection, so when you’re browsing investors, you can see which ones are one or two degrees away in your network and request an introduction with a single click. Because a single warm introduction from the right person can do what 100 cold pitches couldn’t. Vishal Vivek learned that the hard way.

And a post-close investor update room, because the relationship doesn’t end when the wire lands. It’s supposed to compound. Most founders let it die.

Who We Built It For

RoundDrop is for the founder raising $50K to $4M, pre-seed and seed, before a Series A term sheet is on the table. The founder who has a real company, a real thesis, and a real shot, but doesn’t have a brand-name network, a warm intro to every investor, or $5,000 a month to spend on a managed service.

That’s the founder the industry has always underserved. The one who gets told “it’s all about warm intros” without being given a way to build them.

But RoundDrop isn’t just for founders. It’s also for the investors on the other side: the angels who want curated deal flow that matches their thesis, the solo GPs who need a portfolio tracker and LP update tools, the syndicate managers who are tired of running SPVs across five spreadsheets.

Nobody was building for both sides well. That’s the gap we’re filling.

The Longer Vision

Fundraising is one moment in the lifecycle of a company. But the relationships built during a raise, if you nurture them, compound for decades. The angel who writes a $25K check at pre-seed can become an advisor, a customer, a co-investor in your Series A, a connector to your next hire.

RoundDrop is built to make those relationships last. Not just the tool you use during the raise, but the platform you return to every quarter when you send your update, and eventually when you help the next founder find their first check.

We believe every founder deserves a fair shot at finding the investors who are right for them. Not the founders with the best networks. Not the founders who went to the right schools. All of them.

Drop your round. Close faster.