Two Founders Blew Up a Startup Together. Eight Years Later, They Built a Unicorn
Ante Spittler and Anton Rummel's first company collapsed in a six-figure-a-month bidding war. Their second just closed a €30 million round that values it at €1 billion.
Cutting through the Noise
Fundraising stories that don't waste your time. One founder story per edition.
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Polar Raised $5.7M After a Customer Fired Clay
Its founder helped build Perplexity's Comet browser before leaving to build this one.
The AI Industry Is Funding Its Own Distribution Layer
Passionfroot raised $15M from Anthropic's own lead backer - to sell AI companies access to the creators talking about them.
€2M ARR on €1.2M: How Promptwatch Sold Its €6M AI Search Optimization Round
Two repeat founders got two funds to underwrite the same number, for the Amsterdam platform that makes brands visible inside ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity.
They Told Him VCs Don't Fund Consulting. He Raised €10M Anyway
How Berlin PropTech Fuchs & Eule turned "boring" energy-renovation advisory into a data moat, got GET Fund to lead, and had all three existing investors pile back in.
They Met 45 Funds and Got Zero Term Sheets. Then the Round Died. Then It Closed.
The real story of sunbay.io's €550K pre-seed, and why both funds that said no ended up writing the cheques.
They Were Tokenizing YouTube Videos. Now They Move Millions a Day
The accidental pivot that turned Talentir into a payout-infrastructure company, and got an ex-Google CFO to back it.
Why Sequoia Led Odessia's $6M Pre-Seed Before a Single Line of Product Shipped
Sequoia scored his idea a 7 out of 10 and led the round anyway, on a decade-deep edge and a very public failure. The redemption-raise playbook, in full.
He Sold the Round Before He Opened It: How Podero Staged a €5.5M Oversubscribed Seed
Three months of staged news, no-pitch coffees, and a round run like a sales pipeline. The full playbook.
From a Wine Cellar to a16z in 18 Months
How four Swedes made the most boring job in engineering the most-watched fundraise of the year.