At Remagine Ventures, we meet founders in stealth mode almost every day. There’s always a bit of mixed emotions in these meetings: on the one hand, incredible ambition and on the other hand, a feeling that the product isn’t “ready” for the main stage yet.
If you are currently building in stealth, obsessing over a bug in your MVP or worrying that your deck isn’t perfect, I want to save you some time. You might be playing the wrong game.
There’s no single benchmark that means that you’re ready for Pre-seed. It’s not a minimum revenue number, it’s not a bug-free product, and it’s definitely not a 40-slide deck with flawless design. In fact, we’ve funded pre-revenue teams, sometime pre-MVP.
So what do pre-seed investors look for? We are betting on the team, their velocity and the market.
Here is the reality of what we look for when we write that first institutional check, and why it rarely has anything to do with a “perfect” product.
1. Scrappy traction is wildly underrated
When we say we want to see early motion, we’re not asking for $50k MRR or a bug-free product. We’re looking for undeniable proof that you can create demand and ship at speed, often with almost no resources.
The bar really not that high: how many validation calls did you do with potential customers? What did you learn? Did you create a waitlist and collected a bunch of signups in a short time or found several design-partner from cold outreach? We love that.
Even if the product isn’t fully baked, if your MVP gets a client to say ‘I’d pay for this if this was built’ is sometimes all we need to feel the pull from the market. There are of course differences between B2C and B2B products.
Here are some examples of what this early traction looks like at pre-seed.
| Metric Type | B2B SaaS / Enterprise | Consumer (B2C) | Marketplace | Deep Tech / AI |
| The “North Star” | LOIs / Paid Pilots | Retention / DAU | GMV (Gross Merchandise Value) | Technical Milestones |
| Standard Benchmark | $1k – $5k MRR | 1k – 5k MAU | $5k – $10k GMV / month | Proof of Concept (PoC) |
| “Scrappy” Benchmark | 3-5 Signed LOIs (Letters of Intent) even if unpaid. Shows intent to buy. | 500+ Waitlist on a community platform (e.g., Discord/WhatsApp) with daily activity. | 50-100 Manual Transactions. (You matching buyers/sellers via email). | 1 Key Partnership or Grant (e.g., University spinout, government grant). |
| The “Hustle” Signal | “We cold emailed 500 CTOs, got 50 calls, and 5 LOIs.” | “We have 40% W1 retention because we onboard every user personally.” | “We have $2k GMV, but $0 CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost).” | “We built the prototype using off-the-shelf parts for $500.” |
2. Help us understand where the round takes you (and when’s the next one)
This is the part most stealth founders forget: You are raising capital now specifically so you can raise more capital later. That is the system. When the Seed round feels inevitable in 9-12 months, the pre-seed becomes straightforward.
In the current market, investors know that the biggest risk at pre-seed is simply running out of time. Your job is to prove you can get to market, show signs of demand, and craft a narrative that will entitle you to the next round of funding. In fact, your potential pre-seed investors are less concerned about completing the pre-seed round, they are concerned about your ability to raise the next round (seed) and more importantly, series A.
Based on recent data by Carta (based on US data mainly), only 17.5% of the startups that raised a seed round in Q3 2023 (2 years ago) managed to secure series A by Q3 2025. And based on the benchmarks by A16Z (something I published in more detail in previous posts), the median amount for revenue at Series A is now closer to $3.5M ARR. The pre-seed investor is trying to understand if your pre-seed startup will be able to get there, and what it will take for you to get there quickly.
We aren’t just betting on your vision (though that needs to be big); we are betting on your resourcefulness. We are looking for founders who understand that their primary job is to stay alive long enough to figure it out.
The best pre-seed founders arrive with one slide titled “Use of Proceeds ? Seed Triggers.” For example: “$1.5M gets us to a closed beta with 12 paying design partners at $4k/month each for $50k ARR, one viral launch that drives 15k qualified waitlist signups, one ex-FAANG engineering hire and one GTM hire. That positions us for a clean Seed story at $15-20M pre.”
3. Founder market fit and your unique insight
Most founders pitch a “Category” (e.g., “We are building CRM for Plumbers”). Fundable founders pitch an “Insight” (e.g., “Plumbers don’t need a better CRM; they need an SMS bot that answers leads while they are under a sink because they miss 60% of jobs”).
How you got there is the interesting part.
- The “Secret”: A specific, non-obvious data point you learned by doing the work manually (scrappy traction). What did you discovered about the customer that no one else realises?
- The “Why Now”: A clear reason why this wasn’t possible or necessary 3 years ago (e.g., “LLMs now allow us to parse unstructured plumbing invoices”).
- The “shut up and take my money”: Evidence that the customer is currently hacking together a terrible solution to solve this (e.g., “They are currently paying their spouse to reply to texts at night”).
Traction can be faked for a weekend. Resourcefulness can be performed in a pitch.
But genuine unfair founder-market fit? It’s your ability to convince investors why are YOU the person who gets to win this specific category in the next three years. Usually the answer is a combination of deeply of lived pain, distribution edge, and insight that no one else on earth has in quite the same way.
Shameless plug for Remagine Ventures
Pre-seed rounds are about demonstrating forward motion and potential. You are ready the day you decide to move faster than everyone else.
If you can show us that you can build, launch, and learn faster than the incumbents, the lack of a “complete” product doesn’t scare us. We want to meet you early to understand your insights and conviction to go from a scrappy MVP to category leader.
I see many founders that decide to wait before approaching investors. I think you’ll find most pre-seed investors are willing to have a quick chat, give you feedback and share what they see in the market. You also don’t need a warm intro to reach out to us. If you have a way, great. Otherwise, feel free to reach out on Linkedin or via our ‘pitch us‘ section of our website.
I'm a former general partner at google ventures, head of Google for Entrepreneurs in Europe and founding head of Campus London, Google's first physical hub for startups.
I'm also the founder of Techbikers, a non-profit bringing together the startup ecosystem on cycling challenges in support of Room to Read. Since inception in 2012 we've built 11 schools and 50 libraries in the developing world.
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