Startups

Stellation Capital’s Peter Boyce outlines how to get the best investors and terms for your Series A fundraise at TechCrunch Early Stage

Comment

Congratulations. You’ve built a startup with a solid track record that includes an MVP, an established user base and maybe even consistent revenue. You’ve delivered on your early milestones and several other essential KPIs — metrics investors look at to measure the strength of future growth — are on point.

But there’s a lot more involved in securing your first round of venture capital funding. At this point in 2022, mean Series A funding sits at $21.5 million. And it will require a lot more work, strategy and persistence on your part to tap into that kind of cash.

Plus, your Series A sets the tone for what you can do with your company moving forward. It often means a new board member, a new valuation and a changing equity structure. All of this dictates the long-term trajectory of your startup, and the names listed on that term sheet will be a part of the journey the whole way through.

It helps to have advice and insight from an experienced VC, and that’s why we’ve invited Peter A. Boyce II, the founder and managing partner of Stellation Capital, to dig into the essentials you need to know in his session, Nailing Your Series A at TechCrunch Early Stage on April 14.

The fundraising landscape is shifting, and it’s been a long time since startups have had this much leverage going into their Series A. That’s good news, and Boyce will detail how you can attract the best investors for your startup and receive the best terms — all with an eye to achieving long-term success.

Boyce founded Stellation Capital, his Brooklyn-based, early-stage venture capital firm, in 2021 after serving eight years with General Catalyst. In Stellation’s first year, the firm’s investments include Balanced, Chill Pill, Honeycomb and Hopscotch.

While at GC, Boyce worked with a range of portfolio companies, some of which include Atom Finance, Cadre, Clay, Great Jones, Jet.com (acquired by Walmart), Macro, Mark43, Wanderlog and Workflow (acquired by Apple).

Earlier in his career, Boyce co-founded Rough Draft Ventures — a program designed to support tech entrepreneurs across college campuses. He served as an advisor to a portfolio of more than 275 student-led, early-stage startups such as Cobalt Robotics, Fireflies, FreeWill, Snackpass, Parade and Pavlov (acquired by Coinbase).

Whether your early-stage startup is poised to take the Series A plunge or you’re a founder who simply wants a better understanding of what securing this type of funding requires, this session is for you.

Join Peter Boyce as he shares tips, strategies and advice to help you lock in the right investors for your startup, negotiate the best terms, position your company for long-term success and otherwise nail your Series A fundraise.

TC Early Stage will provide you plenty of time to engage, ask questions and walk away with a deeper, working understanding of topics and skills that are essential to startup success. Register today and reserve your seat before prices increase!

More TechCrunch

Call centers are embracing automation. There’s debate as to whether that’s a good thing, but it’s happening — and quite possibly accelerating. According to research firm TechSci Research, the global…

Retell AI lets companies build ‘voice agents’ to answer phone calls

TikTok is starting to automatically label AI-generated content that was made on other platforms, the company announced on Thursday. With this change, if a creator posts content on TikTok that…

TikTok will automatically label AI-generated content created on platforms like DALL·E 3

India’s mobile payments regulator is likely to extend the deadline for imposing market share caps on the popular UPI payments rail by one to two years, sources familiar with the…

India weighs delaying caps on UPI market share in win for PhonePe, Google Pay

Line Man Wongnai, an on-demand food delivery service in Thailand, is considering an initial public offering on a Thai exchange or the U.S. in 2025.

Thai food delivery app Line Man Wongnai weighs IPO in Thailand, US in 2025

The problem is not the media, but the message.

Apple’s ‘Crush’ ad is disgusting

Ever wonder why conversational AI like ChatGPT says “Sorry, I can’t do that” or some other polite refusal? OpenAI is offering a limited look at the reasoning behind its own…

OpenAI offers a peek behind the curtain of its AI’s secret instructions

The federal government agency responsible for granting patents and trademarks is alerting thousands of filers whose private addresses were exposed following a second data spill in as many years. The…

US Patent and Trademark Office confirms another leak of filers’ address data

As part of an investigation into people involved in the pro-independence movement in Catalonia, the Spanish police obtained information from the encrypted services Wire and Proton, which helped the authorities…

Encrypted services Apple, Proton and Wire helped Spanish police identify activist

Match Group, the company that owns several dating apps, including Tinder and Hinge, released its first-quarter earnings report on Tuesday, which shows that Tinder’s paying user base has decreased for…

Match looks to Hinge as Tinder fails

Private social networking is making a comeback. Gratitude Plus, a startup that aims to shift social media in a more positive direction, is expanding its wellness-focused, personal reflections journal to…

Gratitude Plus makes social networking positive, private and personal

With venture totals slipping year-over-year in key markets like the United States, and concern that venture firms themselves are struggling to raise more capital, founders might be worried. After all,…

Can AI help founders fundraise more quickly and easily?

Google has found a way to bring a variation of its clever “Circle to Search” gesture to iPhone users. The new interaction, launched in January, allows Android users to search…

Google brings a variation on ‘Circle to Search’ to iPhone users

A new sculpture going live on Wednesday in the Flatiron South Public Plaza in New York is not your typical artwork. It combines technology, sociology, anthropology and art to let…

Always-on video portal lets people in NYC and Dublin interact in real time

Apple’s iPad event had a lot to like. New iPads with new chips and new sizes, a new Apple Pencil, and even some software updates. If you are a big…

TechCrunch Minute: When did iPads get as expensive as MacBooks?

Autonomous, AI-based players are coming to a gaming experience near you, and a new startup, Altera, is joining the fray to build this new guard of AI agents. The company announced…

Bye-bye bots: Altera’s game-playing AI agents get backing from Eric Schmidt

Google DeepMind has taken the wraps off a new version of AlphaFold, their transformative machine learning model that predicts the shape and behavior of proteins. AlphaFold 3 is not only…

Google DeepMind debuts huge AlphaFold update and free proteomics-as-a-service web app

Uber plans to deliver more perks to Uber One members, like member-exclusive events, in a bid to gain more revenue through subscriptions.  “You will see more member-exclusives coming up where…

Uber promises member exclusives as Uber One passes $1B run-rate

We’ve all seen them. The inspector with a clipboard, walking around a building, ticking off the last time the fire extinguishers were checked, or if all the lights are working.…

Checkfirst raises $1.5M pre-seed to apply AI to remote inspections and audits

Close to a decade ago, brothers Aviv and Matteo Shapira co-founded a company, Replay, that created a video format for 360-degree replays — the sorts of replays that have become…

Controversial drone company Xtend leans into defense with new $40 million round

Usually, when something starts to rot, it gets pitched in the trash. But Joanne Rodriguez wants to turn the concept of rot on its head by growing fungus on trash…

Mycocycle uses mushrooms to upcycle old tires and construction waste

Monzo has raised another £150 million ($190 million), as the challenger bank looks to expand its presence internationally — particularly in the U.S. The new round comes just two months…

UK challenger bank Monzo nabs another $190M as US expansion beckons

iRobot has announced the successor to longtime CEO, Colin Angle. Gary Cohen, who previous held chief executive role at Timex and Qualitor Automotive, will be heading up the company, marking a major…

iRobot names former Timex head Gary Cohen as CEO

Reddit — now a publicly-traded company with more scrutiny on revenue growth — is putting a big focus on boosting its international audience, starting with francophones. In their first-ever earnings…

Reddit tests automatic, whole-site translation into French using LLM-based AI

Mushrooms continue to be a big area for alternative proteins. Canada-based Maia Farms recently raised $1.7 million to develop a blend of mushroom and plant-based protein using biomass fermentation. There’s…

Meati Foods bites into another $100M amid growth to 7,000 retail locations

Cleaning the outside of buildings is a dirty job, and it’s also dangerous. Lucid Bots came on the scene in 2018 with its Sherpa line of drones to clean windows…

Lucid Bots secures $9M for drones to clean more than your windows

High interest rates and financial pressures make it more important than ever for finance teams to have a better handle on their cash flow, and several startups are hoping to…

Israeli startup Panax raises a $10M Series A for its AI-driven cash flow management platform

The European Union has deepened the investigation of Elon Musk-owned social network, X, that it opened back in December under the bloc’s online governance and content moderation rulebook, the Digital Services Act…

EU grills Elon Musk’s X about content moderation and deepfake risks

For the founders of Atlan, a data governance startup, data has always been at the heart of what they do, even before they launched the company. In fact, co-founders Prukalpa…

Atlan scores $105M for its data control plane, as LLMs boost importance of data

It is estimated that about 2 billion people, especially those in lower and middle-income countries, lack access to quality and affordable essential medicines. The situation is exacerbated by low-quality or even killer…

Axmed raises $2M from Founderful to streamline drug supply chains in underserved markets

For decades, the Global Positioning System (GPS) has maintained a de facto monopoly on positioning, navigation and timing, because it’s cheap and already integrated into billions of devices around the…

Xona Space Systems closes $19M Series A to build out ultra-accurate GPS alternative