The crux of my comment is that I genuinely don't understand why we weren't able to secure funding. I mention the mockups only to point out that they didn't have

The crux of my comment is that I genuinely don't understand why we weren't able to secure funding. I mention the mockups only to point out that they didn't have a working product, whereas we did/do. If I had to guess, I'd say they were able to "tell the money story" better than we were. That is, being able to say to investors "you give us [x] amount of money and we're shooting for [y] amount of revenue in [z] number of years". I felt like we had a compelling pitch, but for some reason investors just never committed.