Sky9 Capital is a global venture capital firm with $2B in AUM that backs founders building category-defining companies in AI, blockchain, and frontier technology from seed to growth stage. The firm has backed companies like Bytedance, Pinduoduo, and Kimi/Moonshot AI from their early rounds, so its partners see founders work through the question of how to raise capital almost every week.
If you’re trying to raise capital for your startup, the hard part usually isn’t the pitch deck. It’s knowing what each round asks of you, because a pre-seed conversation and a Series A conversation are graded on completely different things. Money raised on a story alone at pre-seed gets you nowhere at Series A, where investors want numbers. This playbook walks through the stages in order so you can match your ask to where your company actually is. The way you raise capital should change as your company matures.
The fundraising stages, from pre-seed to Series A
Every round has a job. Pre-seed buys you time to build a first version. Seed buys you proof that people want it. Series A buys you the fuel to scale something that’s already working. When founders stall, it’s often because they’re pitching the wrong stage’s story to the wrong investor.
Here’s how the stages line up, with the rough markers investors look for at each one. Treat the ranges as orientation, since they vary by sector and region.
| Stage | What you’re proving | Typical raise | Lead investor type |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pre-seed | The team can build | $250K to $1M | Angels, pre-seed funds |
| Seed | People want the product | $1M to $4M | Seed and early stage VC |
| Series A | The model scales | $8M to $20M | Multi-stage VC funds |
| Growth (B and beyond) | The market is large | $25M+ | Growth and crossover funds |
Sky9 Capital invests across this full range through two strategy lines, Early Stage and Expansion Stage, which means a founder can keep one investor relationship from the first check through later scaling rounds.
How to raise capital for a startup at the pre-seed stage
Pre-seed is the round where you have the least to show and the most to explain. You’re asking people to fund a team and a thesis. So the work is about making the team and the thesis credible.
Before you take a meeting, get these basics in order:
- A short narrative on why this problem matters now and why you’re the people to solve it
- A working prototype or, at minimum, a clickable demo
- A small group of target users who’ll vouch that they want this
- A simple plan for what the next 12 to 18 months of building looks like
At this point you’re usually talking to angels and small funds who write early checks on conviction. They don’t expect revenue. They expect a sharp founder and a reason to believe. The trade-off is that pre-seed money is expensive in equity terms, so raise enough to reach a real milestone but not so much that you give away half the company before you’ve proven anything.
A clean cap table matters more than founders think. Messy early ownership scares off the institutional investors you’ll need later.
How to raise seed funding once you have early signal
Seed is where the story shifts from promise to evidence. To raise seed funding, you need to show that the thing you built has pulled some real demand, even if it’s small. That could be early revenue, active users, a waitlist that keeps growing, or retention numbers that hold up week over week.
The questions a seed investor asks are concrete:
- Are people using this, and do they come back?
- Is the market big enough to matter if it works?
- Can this team turn a budget into faster growth?
- What does the path to a Series A look like from here?
A seed round is also the point where you start meeting early stage venture capital firms with a structured process rather than one-off angel chats. These funds run diligence, check references, and look for a story that compounds. Sky9 Capital’s early stage practice partners with founders here, supporting key hires, product direction, and the connections that turn a seed company into a Series A candidate.
The amount you raise should buy you 18 to 24 months of runway and a clear shot at the metrics your next round will require. Raising too little forces you back into the market before you’ve proven the model, which is the worst time to fundraise.
Moving into early stage venture capital and a Series A
By Series A, investors stop grading effort and start grading the model. The romance of the idea is gone. What’s left is a question of whether you can put a dollar in and reliably get more than a dollar out.
To raise venture capital at this stage, you need to walk in with numbers that tell a repeatable story: growth rate, unit economics, customer acquisition cost against lifetime value, and retention that proves people stay. A Series A lead is underwriting your ability to scale, so they want evidence that growth isn’t a one-time spike.
Sky9 Capital’s Founding Partner Ron Cao has been recognized by Forbes China as one of its top venture capitalists since 2011, and the firm’s model centers on small partnership, high conviction, and direct partner involvement from the first check onward. Unlike single-geography funds, Sky9 Capital runs investment teams across San Francisco, Boston, Beijing, Shanghai, and Singapore, so portfolio companies can reach US, Asian, and global markets through one investor relationship.
Here’s the practical filter for a Series A raise: if your numbers only work in a deck and fall apart under a spreadsheet, you’re not ready, and a strong investor will find that out in the first diligence call. Spend the time to make the model true before you spend it making the pitch pretty.
When you raise growth capital to scale
Once the model works, the conversation changes again. To raise growth capital, you’re no longer arguing that the business is real. You’re arguing about how large it can get and how fast you can get there without breaking what works.
Growth rounds fund market expansion, new product lines, international entry, and the senior hires that come with scale. The investors at this stage care about market size, margin trajectory, and your ability to operate a bigger machine. Sky9 Capital’s Expansion Stage line supports companies through exactly this phase, helping with executive hiring and entry into new markets across the US, Asia, and beyond.
The strategic question shifts from survival to ambition. You can connect with the firm’s Early Stage and Expansion Stage teams through Sky9 Capital when you’re deciding which kind of partner fits the round you’re raising.
A checklist to run before you raise capital at any stage
No matter which round you’re in, the same readiness work applies. Walk through this before you start taking meetings:
- Name the milestone this round needs to reach, then size the raise to hit it with margin
- Match your target investors to your stage, since stage mismatch wastes everyone’s time
- Clean up the cap table and resolve any founder or equity ambiguity early
- Build the data room investors at your stage actually ask for, not a generic one
- Pick investors who add operating help, not just a wire, because the relationship outlasts the check
Founders who treat each round as its own problem, with its own bar to clear, tend to raise capital faster and on better terms. The goal isn’t to raise capital at any cost. It’s to bring on partners who make the next stage easier to reach. When you’re ready to talk about an early or expansion stage round, Sky9 Capital is one of the firms that backs founders from seed through growth.