How Figures raised $6.8M in Seed funding in just 3 weeks with Claap + Notion?

In June 2022, Figures CEO Virgile Raingeard, came up with a big news: he had just raised $6.8M in seed funding in just 3 weeks… and Claap was instrumental to speed up its fundraising process!

So we sat down with Virgile to get the full back story on his roadshow, and the role async communication played in accelerating the fundraising process.

Figures: getting reliable and up-to-date compensation market data is more important than ever

Virgile created Figures in 2020 to give companies clarity on the salaries being offered to candidates by their competitors, and defining a fair compensation policy.

After getting initial traction in France with over 220 companies in January 2021, they started opening new countries such as the United Kingdom, Germany and other European countries. Their product-market fit was clear and they were ready to accelerate.

This is when they initiated their fundraising process in June 2021.

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Accelerate your fundraising process with async communication

Virgile started his roadshow early in June and closed his round 3 weeks after.

To achieve such a fast fundraising process, Virgile was very methodic in his fundraising process.

First, he decided to select the 15 VCs he wanted to speak with for his fundraising process and had an introductory call with them to pitch Figures.

Then, he gave them access to the data room so they could dig deeper and ask questions about the business, the team, the competition and better understand the business plan.

The final step was the partners meeting where the decision is taken on the VC’s side.

Usually, Virgile told us that he managed to keep this process very tight thanks to async communication and Claap.

I’ve used Claap for 2 use cases in the process. To present the data room and give more context in advance. And then to answer questions they might have on it. I really managed to skip 1 or 2 meetings in the process.

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Presenting your data room with Claap

To prepare for his fundraising process, Virgile had prepared a data room in Notion to present his business plan with his key hypothesis and metrics, the competition, his product roadmap or the hiring plan.

To make it easier to understand and avoid having too many questions, he decided to record a Claap explaining the data room and embed it in the data room in Notion:

In 6 minutes, I onboarded them on our hypotheses we made, the key metrics, where to find the CAC, the LTV.. the different scenarios, the hiring choices we made and boom, and I share the business plan linked with that.Without having to give too many details, I’m providing enough context with the video so that I can really decrease the number of questions I’m going to get.

Answering questions async

Before having a partners meeting, the typical process usually involves having 1 or 2 more meetings to answer questions on the data room.

When speaking with 10-15 different VCs like Virgile, it can drastically make the fundraising process last much longer.

That’s why Virgile decided to use async communication and Claap to skip those meetings and make this part much faster.

I answered their questions with Claap instead of scheduling a meeting. Honestly, if I had to make a meeting to answer all the questions I had, it would just have been too long. It’s much easier to ask them the questions they have, answer them async and then schedule a meeting if necessary.

Making it faster for everyone

Fundraising is a long process for both founders and VCs and requires a lot of work beyond meetings. Virgile told us that streamlining his fundraising through async communication was a strong point that most VCs valued in the process

Many VCs that told me “That’s really cool, great data room and the videos to provide more context that’s super efficient!”

Virgile initiated his fundraising process the 2nd week of June and finalized the round 3 weeks after with this new process that sounds pretty straightforward in his own words:

First meeting. Data room sharing. One or two async back-and-forths. Partners meeting. Term sheet.

A few weeks after Virgile was ready for the big splash 👇

Resources to help you get started

If you loved reading this article and want now to implement those best practices in your own company, here are a few good playbooks to start:

• How to embed Claap in Notion
• How Did We Raise $3M Pre-product… With a Simple Slide Deck and a Data Room?