The platform is built. The market is proven. Capital unlocks distribution.
$750K
Pre-Seed Raise
$20K/mo
Current Burn
18-24 mo
Target Runway
7.5-9.4%
Dilution Range
THE RAISE
Amount
$750K
AI pre-seeds average $500K-2M (Carta 2025). Median pre-seed: $700K. Enough for 18-24 months runway with a full-stack engineer, marketing budget, and IP protection. Total burn: $28K-42K/month.
Instrument
Post-money SAFE
92% of pre-seed rounds use SAFEs (Carta 2025). Post-money SAFE with cap only, no discount. Standard YC terms. Clean cap table, no board seats, no investor veto rights.
Valuation Cap
$8-10M
Median SAFE cap for $250K-$1M rounds: $10M (Carta 2025). AI companies command 42% valuation premium ($17.9M vs $12.6M for non-AI at seed). Pre-revenue status argues for $8-10M. 1.2M lines of code justifies the upper end.
Dilution at $750K
Well below the 10-15% standard range. Preserves substantial founder equity for seed and Series A.
USE OF FUNDS
$750K allocation optimized for distribution velocity. Total burn: $28K-42K/month. 18-24 months of runway.
Marketing & Distribution - 30% ($225K)
Founder's unfair advantage: content at AI-powered velocity.
Engineering - 25% ($187.5K)
1 senior full-stack engineer at $130-150K + equity.
Founder Runway - 20% ($150K)
$20K/mo for 7.5 months, bridging to revenue.
Infrastructure - 10% ($75K)
Sovereign stack deployment, GPU hardware, CI/CD.
IP Protection - 5% ($37.5K)
Provisional patents on core intelligence architecture.
Operations Buffer - 10% ($75K)
Legal, accounting, insurance, tools.
PARALLEL TRACKS
Running multiple capital tracks simultaneously. Speed matters.
Non-Dilutive Credits
Google Cloud $350K, NVIDIA Inception, Microsoft $150K, AWS GAIA $1M. Zero equity.
Accelerators
YC $500K/7%. SPC $400K/7% + $600K follow-on = $1M total access.
Strategic Angels First
Close 2-3 checks of $25K-100K within 30 days. Social proof compounds.
TIMING
Cross-channel relationship intelligence was not possible before 2024. Three technical breakthroughs changed the economics simultaneously.
AI Costs Collapsed 1,000x
$20 to $0.40/MTokGPT-4-equivalent performance dropped from $20/MTok in 2022 to $0.40 today. Processing thousands of emails, Slack messages, and calendar events per user per month was prohibitively expensive 3 years ago. Today it costs pennies.
Context Windows Expanded 100x
4K to 2M+ tokensFrom 4K tokens to 2M+ in two years. Entire email threads, meeting transcripts, and Slack histories can be ingested in a single call. Holistic relationship analysis replaces fragmented snippet processing.
RAG Infrastructure Matured
97M MCP downloadsEmbedding models enable semantic search across heterogeneous communication data. Anthropic MCP reached 97M+ monthly SDK downloads. Multi-source AI integration is now standardized, not bespoke.
Capital Flows to AI
$192.7B in 2025AI startups captured $192.7B through October 2025. The first year more than 50% of total VC went to a single technology category. AI companies command 42% valuation premium at seed. The investor appetite is structural, not cyclical.
TARGET INVESTORS
Precursor Ventures
$250K-500K
Charles Hudson, $66M Fund V. Explicitly backs solo founders pre-traction. Fast decisions (1-2 weeks). Strongest institutional fit.
Afore Capital
$500K-2M
Pre-seed only. AI/ML enterprise SaaS thesis. Emphasizes AI-powered business workflows. Check size matches perfectly.
AI Fund
$250K-1M
Andrew Ng. Co-builds with founders, providing deep technical support. Brand adds massive credibility for AI-native companies.
Amplify Partners
$500K-3M
"First investor for technical founders building technical products for the enterprise." Near-perfect thesis overlap.
2048 Ventures
$300K-600K
Vertical AI and deep tech specialist. Accepts direct applications. Could lead or co-lead the round.
Outlander VC
$750K-2.5M
Comfortable pre-revenue. Wrote the first check into Scale AI. Deep conviction in technical founders.
Hustle Fund
$25K-150K
"Hilariously early" thesis. 2,000+ angel syndicate for round amplification. Pre-seed specialist.
Mathilde Collin
Front co-founder. 46 angel investments in enterprise comms. Early angel in Attio. $25K-100K checks.
Joe Lonsdale
Co-founded Affinity and Palantir. Also co-founded RelateIQ (acquired by Salesforce). $50K-500K checks.
Nat Friedman
Ex-GitHub CEO. Would uniquely appreciate 1.2M lines from a solo developer. AI-augmented development champion.
Elad Gil
Ex-Twitter/Google. Seed investor in Perplexity, Character.AI, Harvey. $100K-250K checks.
Reid Hoffman
LinkedIn co-founder. Professional relationship intelligence is his category. 40+ AI investments since 2020.
MILESTONES
Month 1-3
Foundation
10-50 beta users. Senior engineer hired. IP filings submitted. Onboarding flow live (sub-5-min channel connection). Activation metrics baselined. Weekly 15-min feedback calls with every user.
Month 4-6
First Revenue
100-200 users, $5-10K MRR. Product Hunt launch (target: top 5 Product of the Day). First paying customers. PQL scoring implemented. 3-5% freemium conversion baseline.
Month 7-9
Repeatable Patterns
300-500 users, $15-30K MRR. Repeatable activation and conversion patterns. 40%+ "very disappointed" PMF score (Superhuman methodology). Head of Growth hired.
Month 10-12
Scale
500-1K users, $25-50K MRR. 15-20% MoM revenue growth. 85%+ gross revenue retention. 3-5 hires. First enterprise pilot conversations.
Month 13-18
Series A Ready
1.5-3K users, $75-150K MRR. $900K-1.8M ARR run rate. Burn multiple under 1.0x. NRR above 120%. Clear path to $3-6M ARR. Begin seed fundraising prep at Month 9-10.
TEAM GROWTH
Month 1
Senior Full-Stack Engineer
$130-150K + equity. Mobile development, feature velocity, shared on-call.
Month 4-6
Head of Growth / DevRel
Amplifies founder's content advantage. Community building, developer outreach, launch coordination.
Month 8-10
Customer Success
First retention hire. Onboarding optimization, user feedback loops, churn reduction.
Month 12+
1-2 Additional Engineers
Platform scaling, new integrations, performance optimization.
Series A
Expand to 8-15
Full engineering, product, and go-to-market teams.
THE FOUNDER
Galen Oakes
Founder. A marketer who taught himself to code
A content/marketing/creative professional who taught himself to code with AI tools, then built 1.2M lines of production software in 8 months. The GTM advantage isn't theoretical It's the founder's background. Distribution is the bottleneck for every technical product, and this founder already speaks the language of customers, content, and community.
The AI-Augmented Thesis
GitHub Copilot makes developers 55% faster. 41% of all code is now AI-generated. Cursor hit $200M ARR in 12 months, the fastest SaaS company in history. Sam Altman predicted the first one-person billion-dollar company. Solo-founded startups climbed from 22% to 38% of US startups between 2015 and 2024 (Carta).
More Built Than Any Competitor at This Stage
At pre-seed, Sentigen has substantially more built product than any competitor had at their equivalent stage. Affinity had founder credibility and email data. Attio spent 3 years building before launch. Clay had near-zero revenue for 5 years. Folk raised with no product, just a homepage and 10K waitlist. 1.2M lines is comparable to what Series A/B companies have total.
Small Teams Win
Instagram: 13 employees, $0 revenue, $1B acquisition (now $200B+). WhatsApp: 32 engineers, $19B. Midjourney: ~100 people, $500M revenue. Notion: rebuilt by 2 people in Kyoto, now $10B. Solo-founded startups: 52.3% of successful exits (Crunchbase). MIT Sloan: solo founders are twice as likely to succeed.