FUNDRAISING

We were profitable before we took a dollar of venture capital. SoftBank didn't save us — they accelerated us. That's the only reason to take outside money.

We raised $3.5 billion on a vision of the future. The vision was right. The timing was wrong by about a decade. That's an expensive lesson in patience.

Fundraising is not the goal. It's a tool. The goal is to build something people want. Founders who confuse the two end up with money and no product.

I raised $850 million to prove that electric cars could work for everyone. We proved they could. We just couldn't prove we could make money doing it.

We almost ran out of money in 2015. Nobody wanted to fund a meditation app. Then the world had a collective anxiety attack and suddenly everyone wanted in.

SoftBank put in $3 billion. Everyone said Masa Son was crazy. Then we went public at $84 billion and suddenly he looked like a genius again. That's how Masa works.

SoftBank invested $255 million. They told me: you're building the Nubank of lending. I said: Nubank is the Creditas of credit cards. We started first.

OpenAI invested in us directly. Sequoia led our Series B. We went from founding to $700 million valuation in 18 months. Legal AI isn't a niche. It's one of the biggest markets AI will ever touch.

Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Salesforce all invested in us. Every big tech company. At the same time. That doesn't happen unless you're building something everyone needs.

Reid Hoffman and I started Inflection together. A DeepMind co-founder and a LinkedIn co-founder building an AI company. The investor pitch meetings were very short.

We raised $930 million. Nearly a billion dollars. For a hardware company that never figured out how to make a profit on a single product. That's a special kind of failure.

I spent 10 years trying to get this company funded. Ten years. VCs said card issuing was boring. Then Square Cash Card launched on our platform and suddenly everyone wanted in.

We raised $113 million with no product, no revenue, and a four-week-old company. Just a PDF and three ex-DeepMind and ex-Meta AI researchers. Europe was desperate for its own AI champion. We volunteered.

Peter Thiel invested early. Tencent came later. A $9 billion valuation for a European neobank with no branches. The thesis is simple: banks are software now. The buildings are optional.

We raised $141 million from Google, NVIDIA, and Salesforce. All of them want to own AI video. None of them have a product as good as ours. When your investors are also your would-be competitors, you know the tech is real.

We raised $1.1 billion. For a chip company. In a market where NVIDIA has 90% share. Either we're brilliant or insane. The benchmark results suggest brilliant. The market cap gap suggests we have work to do.

We raised $100 million from Bessemer, Canaan, and Coatue. Some of the smartest VCs in tech. They invested in an AI bookkeeping platform. What they got was a CPA firm with a website.

I raised $100 million and told investors we'd be the open-source AI company. The Linux of AI. That pitch worked beautifully in fundraising. It worked less beautifully in revenue.

Sequoia backed us. Temasek backed us. Every name-brand investor in Asia wrote us a check. When that much money comes in that fast, it can make you believe you are infallible. You are not.

We bootstrapped for 8 years before taking a single dollar of venture capital. By the time investors showed up, we were already profitable. That changes the power dynamic completely.

We were profitable before we raised a single dollar of venture capital. I bootstrapped for 7 years. The VCs did not discover us — we let them in after we had already won.

We raised $1.4 million. Total. Ever. And we built a $5 billion company. The best fundraising strategy is not needing to fundraise.

Sam Altman did not invest $375 million because he is a dreamer. He invested because he saw our data and did the math.

We raised $3.4 billion because instant delivery felt inevitable. The correction taught us that inevitable does not mean immediately profitable.

Mark Cuban invested because he understood that 3D printing a rocket is a 10x improvement, not a 10% improvement. You need to think in orders of magnitude.

Paul Graham funded us because he said: if you can convince strangers to sleep in your apartment, you can convince anyone of anything.

SoftBank believed in us when others did not. The check came with expectations. We are working to meet them.

SoftBank gave us a billion dollars. That is not free money. That is a billion reasons to win.

We raised 400 million before mainnet. That is either extraordinary confidence or extraordinary hubris. We are betting on confidence.

Warren Buffett invested in Paytm. For a kid from a small town in Uttar Pradesh that moment was surreal.

Tiger Global gave us 768 million dollars in a single round. That kind of money makes you think you can conquer the world. You cannot.

Jeff Bezos invested personally. When the richest man in the world bets on your food you know the thesis is strong.

Investors told me a clothing box company was not a real tech company. Our data team is larger than most pure tech startups.

Fundraising for a fund is 10x tougher.

Have the market tell you what they think is a fair valuation.

We've never raised money using bonds before. This bond means that people understand what we're trying to do and gives us the opportunity to secure capital from this alternative fundraising method.