type of business impacts valuation, one also needs to 'earn' their valuationI recently moderated a session at the DisruptInvest Summit 2023, held in Kuala Lumpur in March.
Noomi Fessler, who was part of the Nexea team but joined Lapasar at the time of their first raise in 2018. She is now the CFO of the company. Lapasar first raised a seed round of RM50,000, followed by five more rounds, raising over RM25 million in total. The most recent RM15 million was in December 2022.
This session provided some valuable takeaways for the audience who were mainly startup founders and early-stage investors. Plus, Gerardo and Noomi were super open and willing to share their funding journeys which had many commonalities, despite the businesses being quite different. If you get the business and team right, when in front of the “right investor” the discussion is not about the valuation. This is from two seasoned “fundraisers” who did multiple rounds from 2018 to 2022. Yes, they were the tech-boom years, which we see now in the rear-view mirror. : Gerardo talked about “earning your valuation”. What does that mean? After you raise the money you need to rapidly grow your company – revenues or profits, so that the valuation becomes reasonable.