Founders watching their peers announcing successful seed rounds might be forgiven for thinking that completing a first fundraise is a piece of cake. But behind the celebratory videos and press releases lies the reality that seed funding is never easy.

In September 2025, HSBC Innovation Banking brought together a panel of founders who’d recently raised successful seed rounds. Under Chatham House rules, the panel discussed how they geared themselves up for an intense fundraising process, and what processes provided support and motivation through their seed funding journeys. Below is a summary of the conversation with lessons for other founders building up to raising their own seed rounds.

"I honestly thought raising our seed would be easy, mainly because our founding team had incredible tech companies on our CVs,” said one founder. “I couldn’t have been more wrong. Raising the round was horrible."

Every panellist concurred that founders beginning their seed fundraise should prepare themselves for rejection:

A founder’s ability to manage those stresses and retain a positive mindset is critically important: "A long, drawn-out funding process will inevitably be tough and sap your energy, but you do learn lots from those ‘no’ conversations," remarked one founder.

Adding to the pressure of many rejections is the uncertain trajectory of a funding round. It’s common knowledge that once you have a first term sheet and a potential lead investor, it’s much easier for other funds to follow on. That means that after a long fruitless process, a successful funding round often comes together in the final furlong. "My seed funding round took 10 months in total," remembered one panellist. "I raised £600k in eight months, and then £3 million in the final two months."

Over the years, founders and investors have developed something like a common understanding on ‘best practices’ for early-stage fundraising. But each panellist shared examples of when they’d broken those unwritten rules during their seed funding rounds. Possibly, getting so many ‘no’ decisions might encourage even the most strait-laced founders to start thinking like mavericks.

One founder building a talent access platform revealed that he cold-called an investor’s landline on the off-chance someone would pick up. His call was answered, and the person who picked up revealed that no one had called that number for years. That fund ended up investing in the round.

Another founder showed up in an investor’s hotel before a pitch event, to ensure they’d be the first company that VC would hear from. The investor ended up skipping the event entirely and investing into the panellist’s startup.

The importance of being able to meet investors in person, fostering human connections, was picked up by almost every panellist. The advice?

One London-based founder arranged to meet investors in Australia after flying out to spend time with his family. One of those investment firms ended up leading his UK proptech firm’s seed round.

Every founder will have a different approach to the pitching phase of a funding round. While some founders find it essential to build thorough pitch decks with a clear, compelling storyline, one serial founder takes a different tack: "I’ve founded three companies and I have never done slides. If an investor asks to see slides, I don’t reply to them."

In lieu of slides, he spent time thinking through the single most captivating sentence he could, that would distil the unique value proposition of his startup as an investment. Rather than describing his product in depth, he decided to focus on "5 top engineers building in [insert ‘hot’ industry]." He didn’t suffer from a lack of investor interest: during his most recent seed fundraise, he took nearly 150 meetings in three weeks before closing the round.

A common refrain was just how much admin work goes into planning and delivering a full end-to-end funding process.

Another founder emphasised the practical and psychological importance of structuring investor outreach ahead of time. "It can be demoralising getting to a dead end and thinking, ‘Who do I contact next’? Planning who’s on your pitch list every day keeps the process moving and gives you micro targets to hit for yourself during the frustrating early days."

A fundraising process isn’t a one-way street. "You’re evaluating investors just as much as they’re evaluating you," said one panellist. "Yes, investors have the capital you need. But the wrong investor can be genuinely counterproductive for your prospects."

When you’re meeting with so many investors, what indicators give founders a positive signal? "A bit of introspection really helps: which meetings and conversations energised you the most? That energy is likely to be representative of the amount of energy they’ll put into the partnership after any investment," commented one founder. Another added: "You want investors who are excited by the story and the mission. If their first questions are about numbers, they’re probably thinking about their own financial return first and less about the nature of your potential relationship."

‘Relationship’ is the right word: the panellists agreed that surprisingly, fundraising shares lots of similarities with dating. What tactics create the all-important FOMO (fear of missing out) in an investor, then?

Unreasonable tenacity is perhaps the defining characteristic of seed-stage founders. Through a seed funding round, the reality is that founders need to deal with their hopes being dashed on a weekly or daily basis. But the prize is enormous: partnering with seasoned investors on the next step in your growth trajectory.

The discussion circled back time and again to the importance of risk-taking and optimism when dealing with the uncertainty of a seed process. Maybe that’s why our panellists were all keen to reflect on the times when they thought outside the box, doing their own thing to get in front of investors and to stand out from the crowd.

Thank you to each of our panellists for such a candid, free-flowing discussion, and to our attendees who made the event so lively and interactive. Interested to participate and accelerate your own scaling journey? Check out all our upcoming Founder Success events here.