How sophisticated are investors in general with niche or arcane technology segments that might not be widely understood? Do they know enough to tell if your product solves specific problems, or are they trusting your market validation?

If it was an 'intense 2 weeks' what compromised the back and forth intensity? Negotiation, waiting/anxiety? Were there any big surprises during raising or do they 'like it or not'?

So within 2 weeks, we met with 45 investors (76 calls in 7 days, that's our record ;) ). Our goal was to identify the 10 VCs that understood the best our vision and industry and that could bring the most value.

On those investors, you could see that 50% didn't know much about data infrastructure, or that it was a fresh topic for them. But for the 10 funds we liked best, they knew A LOT, invested in it, brought a lot of insight and value, just by interacting with them.

So for the next round, we will mostly focus on those 10 funds, keep them posted on our progress, so that the next round is just a question of when and how.

In terms of negotiation, I would say we had a lot of interest, so we could have negotiated the valuation higher, but for us, it was more a question of who we wanted to work with.

But will try to write a blog post on the process for more details, if you think that could be useful.

I think that would be incredibly helpful to the community, but I wouldn't ever press an 'extremely busy person' to do such a thing. I honestly which YC had an 'after action report' section for founders just to quickly write up some materially experiential things.

Congrats on your raise, your pitch to me has basically all of the attributes - some people see it as some kind of arcane magic, but for B2B generally I don't think it is, it seems you've nailed the issues quite squarely. It's a good benchmark well done.

Will try to find some time for that. Will post it on HN, if I do

Since the deal was hot did you issue a term sheet rather than having the prospective investors come up with terms? The latter can lead to anchoring.

How did you get in contact with investors? I went to the accel website but I can't tell what role they play.

They were incubated by YC, presumably that's how the connections were made.

There are 3 ways we got connections:

1) We did have some intros thanks to being a YC company. That definitely helped.

2) For some funds for which we really wanted intros, we asked our investors.

3) We timed these 2 weeks of fundraising to happen 2 weeks after some important product release for us (0.2.0). And we did get some inbound from investors (them reaching out to us).

Also being at the crossroads of data infrastructure and open-source helped a lot, as both are important topics for investors right now.

We tried to keep the meetings with the funds that we liked most at the end. For instance, Accel was the 42nd investor we met with.

Thanks!