Written by Nathan Beckord
Building and nurturing relationships is paramount when it comes to fundraising.
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Despite having an incredibly long and successful career, Brad Porter is still actively learning and refining his approach to fundraising.
Brad’s 30-year career highlights include deploying over 500,000 robots as Amazon’s Vice President and Distinguished Robotics Engineer and accelerating robotics as CTO of Scale AI .
Today, Brad and his co-founders Jane Mooney (ex-Amazon) and Steph Trifonas (ex-Tellme and Microsoft) are leading collaborative robotics, driving the future of robotics in fields from manufacturing to medicine to the home space. We are developing .
Brad explains: “When I started working on collaborative robotics, I wondered if there was anything easier to solve this than humanoids, but I couldn’t find anything.”
That’s when the Collaborative Robotics team developed a “collaborative robot” using holonomic motion. “[The cobot]can move in any direction,” Brad explains. “You can load and unload boxes, totes, and carts from shelf space, or grab and move existing carts.” Thanks to robust language models, navigation planning, autonomy, and sensing, users can interact with cobots. You can also have a conversation. For example, you can say, “Take this tote to reception,” and the cobot will follow your instructions.
These robots are “cooperative and can work in and around humans, but they don’t have a humanoid form factor,” Brad explains. These are futuristic robots.
In this article, Brad shares his journey with Collaborative Robotics so far. He outlines the importance of networking, shares the book that got him through a seed round, and explains why you need to stay nimble to ultimately survive.
How to raise money for a startup
1. Leverage your network
For Brad, nurturing relationships is paramount. Thanks to his decades in the industry, he already had a large following by the time he founded Collaborative Robotics. When it came time to secure seed funding for a new business, Brad started by reaching out to his network. He was able to raise over $2 million in this “friends and family pre-seed round.”
Brad says that at this early stage, people were actually invested in him more than the technology. He hadn’t even put together a pitch deck.
2. Stick to the playbook
Brad credits Bolt founder and CEO Ryan Breslow’s book “Fundraise” for guiding the seed money round. “It’s solid gold,” Brad says. “All the strategies there worked perfectly. Everything he explained made sense.”
Prior to his experience with Collaborative Robotics, Brad had never personally spearheaded a fundraising effort. But he stuck to Breslow’s strategy, even though it seemed counterintuitive, and it ultimately paid off. He raised over $11 million in just three weeks from a group of motivated VCs and angels, including Ali Partovi (Neo, Khosla Ventures, 1984 Ventures, Calibrate Ventures), to get Collaborative Robotics off the ground.
Brad has said that Breslow’s advice helped him develop an art that “engages people without giving up everything.” Your introduction should reveal enough to secure a phone call or in-person sales pitch.
3. Don’t be afraid to be commercial
Brad recognizes that he benefited from serendipitous market timing in his seed round. By the time Collaborative Robotics was ready to pursue Series A funding, the environment wasn’t all that funding-friendly. “This is not the market for purists,” Brad remembers thinking. “This is a market for getting things to market as quickly as possible, and you can bootstrap if you want.”
He continues: “Nobody would have had any real concerns about whether Brad Porter, a well-known engineer at Amazon with a proven track record, could build the technology. The question was whether Brad Porter could sell it to companies. That was it.”
Noting that financing is easiest to raise when you don’t need it, the collaborative robotics team has secured at least two major customers, including Mayo Clinic, to increase cash flow and demonstrate viability. We worked hard to secure it.
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4. Systematize your outreach strategy
When Brad started working on raising Series A funding, he first used Google Sheets to track potential investors. However, it quickly became clear that this approach was not detailed enough to meet his needs.
To solve this, Brad developed a more structured method of creating individual profiles for each investor to track ongoing conversations and follow-ups. He recommends breaking down the outreach process into its smallest parts to keep things organized and on track.
“This system was very helpful in tracking different conversations…it was just a simplification,” he says.
In the end, Brad’s strategy worked. Collaborative Robotics has raised $30 million in Series A funding led by Sequoia Capital. Previous investors also contributed, including Jeff Wilke (former CEO of Amazon Consumer), Fuel Capital, and MVP Ventures.
5. Be prepared to sail even if the wind changes.
After closing the Series A, Brad did not plan to raise a Series B until 2025. He kept communication open with Series B-level investors, but was mostly focused on building the robot and getting it up and running in the field. Preparation for showcase for investors.
However, several events occurred and he revised his plans. First, the topic of robotics started to pick up. Investors have concluded that AI is on the verge of enabling advanced robotics. Additionally, AI robotics company Figure AI has closed an incredible funding round, further fueling interest in robotics in general.
Brad felt the wind shift. He consulted with Uber advisors Emil Michael and Sequoia Capital’s Alfred Lin. “I think we should just hoist the sails and see if we can get them up right now,” Brad remembers saying. Everyone agreed that as conditions change, strategies need to change accordingly.
Collaborative Robotics has decided to open an investor showcase to include a select number of potential Series B investors. “We didn’t run a process with Series B, we just followed up with people after the event,” Brad explains.
In just eight weeks, Brad was able to raise $100 million led by General Catalyst. Existing investors Sequoia Capital, Khosla Ventures, Mayo Clinic, Neo, 1984 Ventures, MVP Ventures, and Calibrate Ventures were joined by Bison Ventures, Industry Ventures, and Lux Capital.
6. The process is difficult – try it yourself
If scraping together capital and keeping a startup afloat can sometimes feel like a challenge, Brad says there’s a good reason: because you are. “This process is pretty much set up to test your belief in your idea,” Brad explains. Ultimately, the best thing founders can do is accept this reality and rush headlong into the fray. “The more you think it’s not hard, the more you’re going to beat yourself up,” Brad warns.
The key to success is having enough confidence in your idea to keep moving forward in the face of adversity, and enough confidence to reflect and improve your pitch when you’re told “no.” It’s about having humility.
Ultimately, Brad advises entrepreneurs to be determined and pursue the right investors. “You’ll get better,” Brad says. “You’ll get better at selling, pitching, handling rejection, and finding people who believe in you and your beliefs.”
This article is based on an interview with Nathan Beckord and Brad Porter on an episode of Foundersuite’s podcast How I Raised It.
About the author
Nathan Beckord is the CEO of Foundersuite.com, which creates software for startups raising capital. Nathan is also the CEO of Fundingstack.com, a new platform for VCs and investment bankers to raise capital and support their clients and portfolio companies. Users of these platforms have raised more than $9.7 billion since 2016.
