Ask HN: B2B firm needs our tech to raise their $5M Series A
1. Just spent 2 meetings w/ a company that needs proprietary technology from my ($20k MRR) startup to raise their own Series A.
2. Their CEO and I have a similar background: we both geeked out on the same scientific breakthrough a few years ago and each figured out a real-world application of it.
3. I just launched an AI-augmented software implementation that I sell to SMBs as a SaaS subscription. This guy went with a hardware implementation (a steampunk machine that he travels around with) that he sells as a service to Fortune-500-level companies.
4. These guys launched ~5 years ago, are badasses and make a killing, w/ $4MM+ a year in revenue and great profits.
5. They want to raise a $5MM Series A to turn their service offering into a digital, subscription-based, pay-$$-per-user-per-month offer to their existing Enterprise clients.
6. All their Enterprise clients say "we want to put 10,000 users in at $6/month/user, BUT we would need features [X] and [Y] before we sign on". Their projection is an opportunity of ~20MM in ARR in 5 years. However this company can't deliver either X or Y with their current hardware stack.
7. They're trying to raise the Series A to build a software stack that delivers X and Y (they're budgeting 2 years and $1.5MM+ out of their raise to get there). VCs are saying that the technical risk is way too big, so they've turned to private investors.
8. Their CEO/co-founder just found out that we have already built "X", and that with our tech base we can build "Y" super easily. He's thrilled because partnering with us would completely de-risk their big strategic move.
9. On our side, "Y" is a feature that our SMB customers don't need, so we have to be very careful and strategic about going that direction since it might divert us from building feature Z that our core market desires, and which is on our direct path to product-market fit.
Where do I go from here?