As part of the Founder Institute’s series of free online startup events for entrepreneurs practicing social distancing, we were pleased to welcome Finmark CEO Rami Essaid in October 2021, for a live discussion on the topic of Seed Funding & Financial Planning: A Guide to Raising Your First Funding.
Raising your first round of funding can be daunting. How much should you raise, where do you start, and how do you find investors? In this video, Rami Essaid answers these questions and shares more tips for startup leaders on raising their first seed or pre-seed rounds. Leveraging his experience starting Finmark (a YC-backed financial modeling startup) and Distil Networks (Techstars-backed and acquired in 2019), Rami covers topics like how the VC ecosystem works, how to effectively pitch your startup, the key metrics investors care about, and more!
About the Speaker: Rami Essaid
Rami Essaid is co-founder and CEO of Finmark. He also serves as Venture Partner at IdeaFund Partners where he focuses on investing in cyber, infrastructure, and fintech companies. Rami also serves as an Extended Team Member at Ubiquity Ventures. Prior to founding Finmark, Rami was founder of Distil Networks, the global leader in bot detection and mitigation. As CEO, Rami grew Distil to over 200 employees and $25MM in revenue. With hundreds of enterprise customers and 5 global offices, Forrester named Distil Networks as a leader in the Forrester Wave: Bot Management in 2018 and 2019. Distil was acquired in 2019 by Imperva, a leader in the application security segment. Prior to that, Rami was the founder of ChitChat Communications. An alumnus of the YCombinator and TechStars accelerator programs, Rami now serves as a mentor for current participants, advising the next generation of entrepreneurs and coaching them on how to scale their businesses while continuing to provide innovative and boundary-pushing products and services.
Graduates of the Founder Institute are creating some of the world's fastest growing startups, having raised over $950M in funding, and building products people love across over 185 cities worldwide.
See the most recent news from our Grads at FI.co/news, or learn more about their stories at FI.co/journey.
