but he said it's too early as we didn't have many paying customers back then and the valuation and terms wouldn't be optimal The last time I tried to raise any

but he said it's too early as we didn't have many paying customers back then and the valuation and terms wouldn't be optimal The last time I tried to raise anything it was pretty much impossible to do pre-revenue. Even a small seed round has expectations that you'll have launched already[1]. Obviously it depends on a lot of factors, but there's a chance your CEO was right. [1] ...which defeats the point of it being a seed round in my opinion. If you've proven the model and you have money coming in then you're raising a Series A. rant rant