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Key Takeaways Passion won’t convince investors to invest in your business — coming fully prepared to answer their questions will.
Investors want to see what your team will look like, and who’s on it.
Getting an investor recommendation from another founder, if possible, can be crucial for getting your foot in the door.
In 2019, I decided to exit my digital marketing agency, moved back to India and started building something completely different — a company that could turn agricultural waste into sustainable alternatives to single-use plastic. I began with hemp in the mountains of Uttarakhand, working with farmers and figuring out what was even possible. The work was exciting, but it was also expensive.
My agency exit gave me a runway, but it wasn’t going to last forever. And everywhere I looked, startups were raising capital. Fintech rounds. SaaS deals. Edtech mega-raises. That’s when I too started trying to raise funding.
I didn’t know how to write a pitch deck. I didn’t know what a cap table was. I didn’t know that the next five years would involve 106 investor rejections before Ukhi — my biomaterials startup — closed a $1.2 million seed round led by 100Unicorns, with backing from Venture Catalysts and debt financing from SIDBI. Those 106 conversations weren’t a wall I hit and then broke through. They were a slow, grinding education. Here is what I learned along the way.
This is what those 106 conversations taught me.
1. I believed passion would convince investors — it doesn’t
I had real skin in the game. I had moved to the remote mountains of Uttarakhand, not for a startup retreat, but to live with marginal farmers and understand their reality. So when I walked into investor meetings, I talked about transformation. I talked about how hemp could change livelihoods, and about how India was ignoring a crop that the rest of the world was waking up to.
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