Skipping from Pre-Seed to Series A with Dreadnode

"Would you be mad at us if we raised more money?"

That was the text I got late one night from Will Pearce, co-founder and CEO of Dreadnode, a company we'd funded about nine months prior.

I'd gotten to know Will through a cold DM he sent me. The DM had nothing to do with tech or investing, just starting a conversation. At the time, Will was working at NVIDIA as an AI red team lead putting him at the cutting edge of AI and ML security. As we got to know each other, it was clear he had a large vision for where the puck was going for the broader market and where his expertise and insights could create the foundation for building the leading company for offensive AI security.

I offered to put together a small round to put he and his co-founder, Nick Landers, in business. We filled the round out with several value-added angels and were off to the races to build product and company with indie ideals at the core. And it worked!

Within months, they were signing contracts with the top names at leading research labs and hyper-scalers. On several occasions, they were even profitable! And then the VCs noticed.

Shortly after our round closed, the word started to spread on what the team at Dreadnode was building. Then the emails started. The early answers were nos and not interested, but as demand from customers grew and incredible, early potential team members started coming out of the woodwork, these high class problems were becoming very real problems.

The team found themselves turning away customers and potential hires as their demand outstripped their resources. Thus, the late night text.

The text led to a conversation that led to a formal fundraising process and ended in the announcement last week of Dreadnode's $14M Series A led by Decibel, a top tier firm focused exclusively on security.

In today's video, we unpack the conversation and process that unfolded after that late night text. We dig into why Will may have had concerns that I, and indie, would be upset or not supportive of their decision, and learnings from two very green and very technical first time founders getting sucked into their first proper fundraising process. 

I hope what comes through in video is something I've written often — we are not anti-fundraising. But we believe that the best way to improve your odds of building a generational company that can attract world class customers and investors is to focus on the former, the latter will come. And when they do, you'll be in a position of ultimate optionality that empowers founding teams to pick exactly the partner they want, on the terms they want, and get back to build the company they want. 

It seems obvious, but it runs so counter to the advice and examples that get celebrated in the startup world. In the case of Dreadnode, they were able to do just that — work with the partner they wanted on the terms they wanted. And, as an added benefit, they were effectively able to skip 2 or 3 interim rounds of funding and skip straight to a fully baked Series A. 

Our goal with today's video was to put some personalities and experiences to that narrative and I think it comes through here. As always, I hope you enjoy watching it as much as we enjoyed recording it. 

PS — if you see any of yourself in the Dreadnode founders, don't hesitate to reach out to discuss what you're building and whether indie could be a fit for you too.