Speaking from Graphistry experience and now louie_ai, both of which are real tech:
* Initial Graphistry funding was from showing compelling 10X technology demos started in my PhD through my extended network, which got us angel & seed and first early adopter customers, which let us hire a tiny team to build the real tech (which pivoted at our first 'big' customer) and start on our product discovery journey . Before then, ran out of my savings, and during a funding dry spell, same. All new R&D for last few years has been customer funded.
* Louie.AI: We have been reinvesting revenue here and signing on paying design partners to co-build with . (If you are on Splunk, OpenSearch, Databricks, AWS Neptune, or a graph DB, and want to use genAI for investigation & analyses, lmk!.) Skipping VC $ has felt much better as we are much more aligned with our design partners.
If I was going to do it from scratch again, I would either do a PhD and spin out when ready, or do a consultancy and build out from that. Using VC dollars and hoping you march into product market fit is horrible, a lot has to work out just right, yet you are trying to cook with a flamethrower and short fuse.
* Initial Graphistry funding was from showing compelling 10X technology demos started in my PhD through my extended network, which got us angel & seed and first early adopter customers, which let us hire a tiny team to build the real tech (which pivoted at our first 'big' customer) and start on our product discovery journey . Before then, ran out of my savings, and during a funding dry spell, same. All new R&D for last few years has been customer funded.
* Louie.AI: We have been reinvesting revenue here and signing on paying design partners to co-build with . (If you are on Splunk, OpenSearch, Databricks, AWS Neptune, or a graph DB, and want to use genAI for investigation & analyses, lmk!.) Skipping VC $ has felt much better as we are much more aligned with our design partners.
If I was going to do it from scratch again, I would either do a PhD and spin out when ready, or do a consultancy and build out from that. Using VC dollars and hoping you march into product market fit is horrible, a lot has to work out just right, yet you are trying to cook with a flamethrower and short fuse.