Raising Capital

A New Year begins, and hopefully new goals and ideas for your business. In order to drive ambitious plans, often it’s required to raise external capital to achieve more in less time.

At I.V. Capital, we understand the time and resource constraints business owners and managers face while thinking of big picture while driving day-to-day operations. Finding the right partner and type of capital for your needs takes time but can create immense rewards.

In this newsletter, we describe our detailed approach to capital raising, outlining the pivotal steps to make the process smoother for your team and successful on its financial objections.

1️⃣ Understand your context: Timing is essential in your capital raising. In turbulent times as we are living, with high inflation and interest rates, it’s even more important to understand the conditions you should expect, whether costs and repayment profiles for new loans or downside mechanisms or different structures for new equity. In riskier times, funding partners also take longer to make new investment decisions so be sure to plan conservatively for you fundraising closing.

2️⃣ Define your capital needs: all investors, be lenders or equity investors, will ask why you need the capital, what you will do with it and how that will create value to your business and, consequently, them. As such, it’s crucial you spend considerable time to understand the economics of your business (if already operating) and prepare a cashflow with at least 24 months but ideally 2-5 years. Clear present the operational results of the business, the capital expenditures needed and don’t forget payment profile of any existing liabilities.

3️⃣ Define your potential financing partners: First, research and explore any financial support that are non-reimbursable or with favourable conditions such as low cost capital subsidies or grants. These should be prioritized before you identify the other potential providers of capital since it’s likely it will count in your favour for both debt and equity. It’s also a great way to test your business plan, organize your documentation and ideas and take feedback onboard before you engage with more sophisticated investors. Take the time to understand the criteria and track-record of your potential funding partners, especially for equity or structured instruments, before reaching out.

4️⃣ Prepare your materials: first impressions count immensely when raising capital. It’s crucial that your information is clear and organized as possible. This shows care, dedication and thoughtfulness of management teams which is perceived highly by investors. Besides that, having all information ready and organize can speed up significantly the due-diligence process and accelerate the closing of your fundraising.

At I.V. Capital, we are committed to let you focus on what you do best: run and grow your business. Free up your time to do that without the worry how you will manage to find capital to put your business ideas into action.

We invite you to reach out to our team today to discover how we can assist you to plan, organize and execute your next capital raising.

Stay connected with I.V. Capital for ongoing insights and strategies on capital raising by following us on our social media channels.