Venture Hacks

Startups are starting to raise Series A’s and B’s from big VCs on AngelList (Ed: We should have spent more than 30 seconds thinking of a name for the site).

Taulia recently raised a $3M Series A from Matrix Partners via AngelList. Josh Hannah from Matrix has joined Taulia’s board of directors. Trinity Ventures and The Angels’ Forum also participated in the round.

Matrix doesn’t have the biggest brand in the VC world but they do have the top performing VC fund ever. Which is insane. We’re very happy to have them in the community.

Here’s what Bertram Meyer, Taulia’s CEO told me about the experience:

“We were distributed on AngelList one Friday evening based on a signed term sheet from The Angel’s Forum and some initial traction. Requests for introductions started to come in immediately and by the end of the weekend we had received close to 40 requests; the majority from senior partners at top VCs. We felt a great fit with Josh Hannah and David Skok from Matrix, who also were the fasted to commit, such that we were oversubscribed by next Wednesday. 4 weeks later we closed our round with Matrix, Trinity Ventures and TAF, but compared to the initial term sheet we had more than doubled the round size and significantly increased the pre-money. Hindsight my only mistake was to contact Naval a bit too late in the process—had I known how powerful AngelList is (and how willing Naval is to give advice), I would have done so much earlier.”

I also reached Josh Hannah from Matrix for a quote and he said:

“AngelList is a powerful service for connecting entrepreneurs with the investors who can be the most helpful to their business. For Matrix, the Taulia investment was as close to a no-brainer as you’ll see: a full battle-tested team, on their second venture together, in a market they know intimately. Put that together with the deep expertise in scaling a SaaS business that Matrix can bring, and I think together we have a shot to build a really big company.”

What does a typical AngelList email look like?

Here’s the email that Naval sent to the investors that Taulia wanted to meet (I’ve updated it a bit to meet Naval’s current email style):

Subject: Taulia - Enterprise discount network, serial entrepreneurs, Postini investor committed

Taulia "helps Global 2000 corporations save tens of millions of dollars annually by enabling their suppliers to opt for earlier payment of approved invoices against a discount." Check them out at http://taulia.com and see their profile at http://angel.co/taulia.

Thanos Triant (investor in Postini) and The Angels' Forum are committed to this round.

[1-2 sentences about traction normally go here. Redacted for obvious reasons.]

The founders previously founded and sold Ebydos, a provider of AP automation solutions, to ReadSoft.

Taulia is based in San Francisco and is raising a $xM Series A and $yM of this amount is already committed.

Every elevator pitch should be this short: product, social proof, traction, team, location, deal. The end.

The other thing you should know about AngelList is that Naval and I are not the only people who can share startups via email. Anyone can share a startup with their followers. And we’re building tools to make that easier and move obvious. Naval and I want to get out of the dealflow curation business and let the community curate dealflow. And it’s already starting to happen.

If you’re an investor, there are more Series A’s and B’s happening on AngelList right now. And if you’re a startup raising a venture round, please get in touch via AngelList.