Two gates, a bridge, and the print.
The seed does one job: reach the reuse-curve print with the trust layer built. That print is the milestone that de-risks the whole thesis and unlocks the Series A at a materially higher valuation. Everything in the plan serves the print, the trust layer that must precede a live payout, or the runway that spans them.
Trust and anti-fraud
The fraud model is built into the ledger before any payout rail. It requires a red-team memo that survives a hostile read. Funded at $250K of the seed.
The reuse-curve print
The cross-tenant reuse rate is proven to rise on live traffic. This is the secret the whole model turns on, measured before it is monetized. Funded at $300K of the seed.
The two gates together are $550K of the $1.75M, roughly a third of the round, and they are the third that matters most: clearing them is what moves the concluded valuation and unlocks the Series A.
From close to global scale, in order.
- Now
Seed close and entity formation
The Delaware C-corporation is formed as the raise vehicle and the $1.75M seed closes. With ten paying customers near covering their own costs, the round funds a bridge, not a march to profitability.
- Delaware C-corporation formed
- Seed closed, $1.75M at a $35M post-money cap
- Gate one
Trust and anti-fraud layer live
The 'demand cannot be faked' property is enforced in the provenance ledger, with a red-team memo that survives a hostile read before a single dividend is paid. A payout system without a fraud model is a bug bounty for your own treasury, so this is a gate, not tuning.
- Distinct-payer diversity and attribution rules
- Red-team memo and adversarial review
- Ledger migration for fraud signals
- Gate two
The reuse curve prints on live traffic
The cross-tenant reuse rate is proven to rise on live traffic, with the counterfactual measured. This is the milestone the whole raise is structured around: it moves the one number from being-measured to measured, and collapses the largest discount in the valuation.
- Live-traffic instrumentation and cohort tracking
- Counterfactual and switching-cost measurement
- The curve bends up on non-friend-graph cohorts
- After the gates
The open standard and first operators
The workspace format is published as a named, versioned open standard with a reference runtime and a public conformance suite, in parallel with the first operator partnerships that warm the cache across a book of clients.
- Reference runtime and conformance suite published
- First operator partnerships onboarded
- Builder ecosystem seeded
- On the print
Series A and global scale
Once the reuse curve has printed, the $10M Series A at $100M post-money funds global scale: the operator motion internationally, the seeder economy activation, and the certainty product line that is the durable, non-deflating revenue the standard-layer thesis rests on.
- $10M Series A at $100M post-money
- Global operator network
- Seeder economy activation
- Certainty product line
Roughly 18 to 24 months to the gates.
At the modeled base burn, the $1.75M funds the runway to the print. The cumulative cash trough is shallow, and the seed plus the Series A comfortably span it.
| Quarter | Primary milestone | Cumulative seed spend |
|---|---|---|
| Q1 – Q2 | Trust-layer build begins; instrumentation live | ≈ $450K |
| Q3 – Q4 | Red-team memo; conformance suite draft; first operators | ≈ $900K |
| Q5 – Q6 | Reuse-curve cohort measurement underway | ≈ $1,350K |
| Q7 – Q8 | Reuse curve prints; Series A raise | ≈ $1,750K |
Indicative and refresh-required against the live model runway.