Amber Atherton of Zyper and Iba Masood of TARA on Raising a Series A as a Female Founder

All right, so today I have EBU Masood from Tara and Amber, assistant from Zai.

How's it going?

Hello, good. So today we're gonna talk about fundraising, but before that, let's talk about your companies.

So, Eva, what do you do?

So, correct, it's great to be here. I'm EBU Masood, I'm the co-founder and CEO of Thara. A.I. So we're building an end-to-end A.I. solution for product management. We help product managers, engineering managers, spec out their products, gain insight into their development lifecycle, and essentially monitor progress within software development.

Hello, so great to be here. Zai helps brands connect to their superfans to build community. So we work with a lot of big Fortune 500s, like Kellogg's or Nike, to help them really identify who that top 1% of fans are and then bring them into a space to co-create product or to become brand ambassadors.

Okay, and so both of you this year raised your Series A, but I think it would be interesting to start from the beginning. So could you tell me your story? Did either of you raise pre-YC?

Yes, I did.

Okay, so yeah, this would be good. So one in one, okay, so how did you do it?

Okay, so in 2017, I was in London. I started my company in 2017 and I raised 1.2 million seed in London from a VC in London and a lot of angels involved in that round—great angels involved in that round—and then I applied to YC and got in.

Okay, and they needed, what, stakes?

Yeah, and you just apply?

I see, but you applied a couple times, right?

Yeah, I did. So I applied twice, and at the time it was a different idea, a different company, different market segments. We were focusing on the Middle East, so it was basically like a careers platform for fresh grads—entirely different company.

Okay, and what did you get in with?

We got in with the careers platform for grads in the U.S. So that was like the first; that was in 2015, when we first got in.

I see, and post-YC for that, we raised roughly around 200k or so.

So it was for that product?

Yes, for that product specifically. And it was very difficult. Like, the first 100K, I remember it was, it was a very difficult process to raise pre-YC. We had just gotten like 10k in a grant from MIT because we were doing research into GitHub repos. So we were looking into programmers and their work on GitHub, just kind of analyzing the commits and how, you know, we could find patterns essentially, and also try to identify the best programmers out there based on their work.

And get?

And so that early research actually formed the thesis and the infrastructure for Thara as it stands today.

Oh interesting. Which we, Thara, we officially launched and like—not even like the website or the product—but just launched with the idea in 2017.

Okay, and how did the pivot go with your investors? How did you go about communicating that?

So our investors were very supportive. So when they heard about the market that we were trying to tackle and the product that we were building, they were immediately like, "Oh, here's more money."

So what happened was about 1/4 of our investors doubled down. So from that 200k, when we pivoted, we raised 2.8 million. So we had a three million, call it a three million seed.

Wow, okay. So what would you attribute that round to?

I mean, it was just the opportunity, the market segment, the early team that we had assembled, and then also the early traction that we were seeing from the early ML models that we had applied, as well as early customer traction.

So the seed was in 2018, the three million seed—that's when we announced it—but it had really been a work in progress for a while for that.

So you lumped all that money together and called it three million?

Yeah.

Okay, gotcha. So now, having raised, both of you, a Series A, can you walk me through the differences in the process related to it and how you communicated it to your investors? How long it took—all that stuff?

Yeah, so we did YC Winter '18 and 4Runner Ventures that are seed pre-demo day, and that was exciting! So we raised four million then and we were...