FAQ

Ideally, we want to lead the first investment round in your company. Sometimes this is also referred to as an angel round. As for product development, we will generally want to see the MVP and some go to market story or traction. It is great if you can get those first five clients or sell the very first batch of your product prior to our investment. If getting traction is impossible, you still should have a story of progress and achieving goals in your startup.

Sure, you’re welcome to reach out at any point. A lot of the startups that we’ve invested in came to us too early, but because we could start those relationships and develop a mutual understanding, it was a lot easier to make the investment decisions later on. If you are too far down the road for us, but you believe we could add some value, feel free to reach out as well. We’ll definitely look into what we can do.

• Team first – we want to see how your team has a unique capability to solve the problem that you are tackling. Additionally, we partner with teams that make informed decisions and understand the value of analytics from the very beginning
• Verified target market – is it there, and is it big enough? Have you done your competitive landscape homework?
• First traction – best to get you first five clients or sell a small batch of your product before our investment
• Growth potential – can you quickly grow to $1m annual revenue and then 3x going forward?
• Financing strategy – do you understand what partnering with VCs means for your business? We are focused on startups that will raise capital again in the future.
• Impact – we prefer to invest in projects that have an impact component and add value in a broader sense.

• Timing: we are likely the earliest possible institutional investor due to our focus on early seed
• Acceleration model, built on four pillars:
  – the in-house team focus on fundraising strategy and business development
  – adding coinvestors, business angels with a unique background specifically matched with your needs, to every investment round in a seamless, efficient process
  – Core Competence Hub: a network of trusted partners across three vital areas: Growth, Capital and People & Culture.
  – Unique experience from more than 110 equity investments in the region.

We aim to keep our process short and efficient. You can download the PDF to learn more.

We believe that adding coinvestors at this stage is super helpful for the startup, and we have got a number of cases to prove it. Coinvestors will most often be experienced business angels, and we make sure to find the best possible fit between your needs and their experience.
If you bring someone to the table, that’s great. We are also happy to dig through our network.

Our model assumes regular monthly meetings between the c-level team and the investors. These are focused on strategic matters, like: should we start fundraising?; should we pivot?; should we accelerate/decelerate?
On top of that, you are always welcome to contact the team at AIP Seed with any pressing issues. We want to help founders best we can, and will get involved hands on with things like rebuilding the financial model, creating a new deck, reaching out to investors, finding trusted partners and more.

No, we are looking to invest both in Poland and across the CEE region and the Baltics.

We welcome teams and founders from all backgrounds. AIP Seed has enjoyed great success with a number of female-led startups (like GLOV, SiDLY or Specprawnik).

What we are not, is a pure acceleration program. We do not run batches, and we do not support the startups prior to our investment.
Instead, we focus on tailor-made acceleration after our investment and all the way to a late seed round. Experienced, hands-on coinvestors are vital in this model, and so is the Core Competence Hub that allows startups to reach trusted partners a lot quicker.

AIP is a different product within the same ecosystem, focused on incubation.
We invest both in startups that went through the incubation program at AIP, as well as those that did not.
Occasionally, we will refer you to the team at AIP, if we deem it a good fit for your stage.