Fundraising

Overview

A round settles four things at once: how much money comes in, at what valuation, against which control rights, and on what timetable. The standard sequence runs from pre-seed and seed money supplied by friends and family, angel investors and startup accelerators, through a Series A as the first institutional venture capital round, into Series B and Series C growth rounds. A term sheet is the document that fixes it, covering valuation, liquidation preferences, board representation, anti-dilution provisions, voting rights, founder vesting and co-sale terms, with a typical board of three directors, one investor representative and two founders. The arithmetic of the asset class sits underneath all of that: investors underwrite target returns in excess of 40% per year and exits within 8 to 12 years, which is why a business that will grow steadily and slowly is a poor fit for the instrument however sound it is. Gilles Mattelin runs 100in, a EUR 12M pre-seed fund built with Jorn Vanysacker after their exit of Henchman to LexisNexis in 2024; Boris Bogaert co-founded Pitchdrive after Rydoo was acquired by Sodexo for EUR 60M in 2017; Christophe Morbee is General Partner at Newschool VC; Louis Jonckheere angel invests after co-founding Showpad.

Stated facts & numbers

• Entities tied to the concept on the wiki: 31, of which 15 are people and 0 are companies
• Videos in the Belgian corpus discussing it: 66
• Standard stage ladder: Pre-seed and seed (friends and family, angels, accelerators), then Series A as the first institutional round, then Series B and Series C
• What the term sheet decides: Valuation, liquidation preferences, board representation, anti-dilution, voting rights, founder vesting, co-sale
• Investor return and exit expectation: Target minimum returns above 40% per year, exits within 8 to 12 years
• Operator-founded Belgian fund in the sample: 100in, EUR 12M pre-seed, Gilles Mattelin and Jorn Vanysacker, after the Henchman exit to LexisNexis in 2024
• Exit that funded a later investor in the sample: Rydoo acquired by Sodexo for EUR 60M in 2017; Boris Bogaert then co-founded Pitchdrive
• Round size example on the wiki: EUR 4M for Bizzy, co-founded by Hendrik Keeris and Steve Declercq in 2021
• Valuation discipline, in the corpus: Jürgen Ingels: "Nooit te hoog gaan met uw waardering"