In March of 2020, Nhost had just received $110,000 in pre-seed money from the accelerator Antler, and had 12 months’ worth of runway to attract fund

How we Raised $3M without Leaving the House

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2021-06-16 18:00:10

In March of 2020, Nhost had just received $110,000 in pre-seed money from the accelerator Antler, and had 12 months’ worth of runway to attract funders. The only problem was that we had to do it during a global pandemic – when every country was in lockdown, travel was restricted, and the global economy was on the verge of collapse.

This is the story of how me and my co-founder, Nuno, managed to raise $3M over Zoom during the worst pandemic in modern history.

It was spring in Stockholm, and we had just received $110,000 from Antler’s start-up program. Within days, COVID-19 had begun to spread across the globe and Europe was hit particularly hard. Once the World Health Organization declared it an official pandemic, countries started to close their borders to contain the spread. Just one week before every country in Europe closed its borders, Nuno boarded a flight home to the Azores.

Since we were both used to working remotely, it was an easy transition: We spoke over Discord each day and used a combination of Trello and GitHub to manage our project. Our plan was to release features and a new console design while we improved our key performance indicators (KPIs) so that we could show the value of an open source Firebase alternative with GraphQL to potential investors during our seed round.