Ask HN: Is it possible to raise without traction?

I'm a 36 year old founder who quit a $200k a year job to work on a startup. I figured I had a year of runway (I have a mortgage, health insurance for my family, and other fixed expenses so I can only cut so much fat).

Now that year is half up, I have a MVP that I'm polishing for beta launch in October but all the investors I talk to want to see traction before considering investing in a seed round.

I'm not sure I have enough cash to get to significant traction -- I'm a B2B SaaS so the sales cycle is long and will require me to spend money to make money -- so the question I have is... what is your experience? Is it possible to raise seed funds without traction or have most of your startups needed traction first? (not counting asking family for cash)

I keep hearing about people on HN raising absurd amounts of funds on nothing but an idea... but I have a working prototype and all the East coast investors that I have talked seem to care about is traction. Basically they only want to invest in companies that don't need the money and only want to use it to accelerate growth.

All the best, thanks for any advice.