Startups

Stellation Capital’s Peter Boyce outlines how to get the best investors and terms for your Series A fundraise at TechCrunch Early Stage

Comment

Congratulations. You’ve built a startup with a solid track record that includes an MVP, an established user base and maybe even consistent revenue. You’ve delivered on your early milestones and several other essential KPIs — metrics investors look at to measure the strength of future growth — are on point.

But there’s a lot more involved in securing your first round of venture capital funding. At this point in 2022, mean Series A funding sits at $21.5 million. And it will require a lot more work, strategy and persistence on your part to tap into that kind of cash.

Plus, your Series A sets the tone for what you can do with your company moving forward. It often means a new board member, a new valuation and a changing equity structure. All of this dictates the long-term trajectory of your startup, and the names listed on that term sheet will be a part of the journey the whole way through.

It helps to have advice and insight from an experienced VC, and that’s why we’ve invited Peter A. Boyce II, the founder and managing partner of Stellation Capital, to dig into the essentials you need to know in his session, Nailing Your Series A at TechCrunch Early Stage on April 14.

The fundraising landscape is shifting, and it’s been a long time since startups have had this much leverage going into their Series A. That’s good news, and Boyce will detail how you can attract the best investors for your startup and receive the best terms — all with an eye to achieving long-term success.

Boyce founded Stellation Capital, his Brooklyn-based, early-stage venture capital firm, in 2021 after serving eight years with General Catalyst. In Stellation’s first year, the firm’s investments include Balanced, Chill Pill, Honeycomb and Hopscotch.

While at GC, Boyce worked with a range of portfolio companies, some of which include Atom Finance, Cadre, Clay, Great Jones, Jet.com (acquired by Walmart), Macro, Mark43, Wanderlog and Workflow (acquired by Apple).

Earlier in his career, Boyce co-founded Rough Draft Ventures — a program designed to support tech entrepreneurs across college campuses. He served as an advisor to a portfolio of more than 275 student-led, early-stage startups such as Cobalt Robotics, Fireflies, FreeWill, Snackpass, Parade and Pavlov (acquired by Coinbase).

Whether your early-stage startup is poised to take the Series A plunge or you’re a founder who simply wants a better understanding of what securing this type of funding requires, this session is for you.

Join Peter Boyce as he shares tips, strategies and advice to help you lock in the right investors for your startup, negotiate the best terms, position your company for long-term success and otherwise nail your Series A fundraise.

TC Early Stage will provide you plenty of time to engage, ask questions and walk away with a deeper, working understanding of topics and skills that are essential to startup success. Register today and reserve your seat before prices increase!

More TechCrunch

Trawa simplifies energy purchasing and management for SMEs by leveraging an AI-powered platform and downstream data from customers. 

Berlin-based trawa raises €10M to use AI to make buying renewable energy easier for SMEs

Lydia is splitting itself into two apps — Lydia for P2P payments and Sumeria for those looking for a mobile-first bank account.

Lydia, the French payments app with 8 million users, launches mobile banking app Sumeria

Cargo ships docking at a commercial port incur costs called “disbursements” and “port call expenses.” This might be port dues, towage, and pilotage fees. It’s a complex patchwork and all…

Shipping logistics startup Harbor Lab raises $16M Series A led by Atomico

AWS has confirmed its European “sovereign cloud” will go live by the end of 2025, enabling greater data residency for the region.

AWS confirms will launch European ‘sovereign cloud’ in Germany by 2025, plans €7.8B investment over 15 years

Go Digit, an Indian insurance startup, has raised $141 million from investors including Goldman Sachs, ADIA, and Morgan Stanley as part of its IPO.

Indian insurance startup Go Digit raises $141M from anchor investors ahead of IPO

Peakbridge intends to invest in between 16 and 20 companies, investing around $10 million in each company. It has made eight investments so far.

Food VC Peakbridge has new $187M fund to transform future of food, like lab-made cocoa

For over six decades, the nonprofit has been active in the financial services sector.

Accion’s new $152.5M fund will back financial institutions serving small businesses globally

Meta’s newest social network, Threads, is starting its own fact-checking program after piggybacking on Instagram and Facebook’s network for a few months.

Threads finally starts its own fact-checking program

Looking Glass makes trippy-looking mixed-reality screens that make things look 3D without the need of special glasses. Today, it launches a pair of new displays, including a 16-inch mode that…

Looking Glass launches new 3D displays

Replacing Sutskever is Jakub Pachocki, OpenAI’s director of research.

Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI co-founder and longtime chief scientist, departs

Intuitive Machines made history when it became the first private company to land a spacecraft on the moon, so it makes sense to adapt that tech for Mars.

Intuitive Machines wants to help NASA return samples from Mars

As Google revamps itself for the AI era, offering AI overviews within its search results, the company is introducing a new way to filter for just text-based links. With the…

Google adds ‘Web’ search filter for showing old-school text links as AI rolls out

Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket will take a crew to suborbital space for the first time in nearly two years later this month, the company announced on Tuesday.  The NS-25…

Blue Origin to resume crewed New Shepard launches on May 19

This will enable developers to use the on-device model to power their own AI features.

Google is building its Gemini Nano AI model into Chrome on the desktop

It ran 110 minutes, but Google managed to reference AI a whopping 121 times during Google I/O 2024 (by its own count). CEO Sundar Pichai referenced the figure to wrap…

Google mentioned ‘AI’ 120+ times during its I/O keynote

Firebase Genkit is an open source framework that enables developers to quickly build AI into new and existing applications.

Google launches Firebase Genkit, a new open source framework for building AI-powered apps

In the coming months, Google says it will open up the Gemini Nano model to more developers.

Patreon and Grammarly are already experimenting with Gemini Nano, says Google

As part of the update, Reddit also launched a dedicated AMA tab within the web post composer.

Reddit introduces new tools for ‘Ask Me Anything,’ its Q&A feature

Here are quick hits of the biggest news from the keynote as they are announced.

Google I/O 2024: Here’s everything Google just announced

LearnLM is already powering features across Google products, including in YouTube, Google’s Gemini apps, Google Search and Google Classroom.

LearnLM is Google’s new family of AI models for education

The official launch comes almost a year after YouTube began experimenting with AI-generated quizzes on its mobile app. 

Google is bringing AI-generated quizzes to academic videos on YouTube

Around 550 employees across autonomous vehicle company Motional have been laid off, according to information taken from WARN notice filings and sources at the company.  Earlier this week, TechCrunch reported…

Motional cut about 550 employees, around 40%, in recent restructuring, sources say

The keynote kicks off at 10 a.m. PT on Tuesday and will offer glimpses into the latest versions of Android, Wear OS and Android TV.

Google I/O 2024: Watch all of the AI, Android reveals

Google Play has a new discovery feature for apps, new ways to acquire users, updates to Play Points, and other enhancements to developer-facing tools.

Google Play preps a new full-screen app discovery feature and adds more developer tools

Soon, Android users will be able to drag and drop AI-generated images directly into their Gmail, Google Messages and other apps.

Gemini on Android becomes more capable and works with Gmail, Messages, YouTube and more

Veo can capture different visual and cinematic styles, including shots of landscapes and timelapses, and make edits and adjustments to already-generated footage.

Google Veo, a serious swing at AI-generated video, debuts at Google I/O 2024

In addition to the body of the emails themselves, the feature will also be able to analyze attachments, like PDFs.

Gemini comes to Gmail to summarize, draft emails, and more

The summaries are created based on Gemini’s analysis of insights from Google Maps’ community of more than 300 million contributors.

Google is bringing Gemini capabilities to Google Maps Platform

Google says that over 100,000 developers already tried the service.

Project IDX, Google’s next-gen IDE, is now in open beta

The system effectively listens for “conversation patterns commonly associated with scams” in-real time. 

Google will use Gemini to detect scams during calls