We respect the time of the founders we interact with. We respect our own time too. We know that one of the hardest part about fundraising is getting "venture nos", not a no but not a yes. This creates ambiguity, false hope and frankly wastes everyone's time. We are committed to being upfront, honest and clear with our feedback and we try and do that as fast as we can. In reality, we are all busy. We meet with hundreds if not a thousand new companies every year, so it's hard to get back to everyone immediately. But our ambition is to be as swift as we can be.

However, it's important to point out. If we say no, it doesn't mean we don't think your venture has merit and potential. Our view on ventures potential of being a successful company is not necessarily the same as what we say yes to as a fit for our funds. We have a certain investment thesis and a view to invest in very ambitious founders building global companies that have unique tech. 90% of companies don't fit this bill and for good reason. It's hard and risky. Sure the pay off could be great it if works, but there 's a tough road to get there.

A few more thoughts: We are wrong as often as we are right. We are only making educated guesses based on limited information. The founder is always going to be 100x more informed than us about the market and the opportunity. Our opinion is only that, our opinion.

At Icehouse Ventures we consider the purpose of a pre-seed round to be for product development in order to demonstrate that your solution meets a market need. The size of the raise is usually between $200K - $1M, on a convertible note or at a $3M - $4M valuation.

At the stage of a seed round it's expected that the initial core team have already validated their value proposition and are using the funding to prove product-market fit and prepare to scale. The raise is expected to be between $1M - $4M at a $3M -$10M valuation.

We invest in a range of ventures from spaceplanes that deliver satellites to space, or large scale energy storage systems and a lot of innovations in-between. Our focus is typically on startups in the tech space, software as a service for consumers or enterprises, and hardware product companies. We don't often, but have invested in consumer products, service businesses and biotech/pharma companies.