Case Study: Cleaning Up a Model Before Raising £1.5M

🧩 Overview

Industry: Software / AI
Stage: Seed
ARR: £100k
Service: Financial modelling support before investor meetings

❌ The Problem

The founders had built their own financial model, but it had too many issues. Investors told them they urgently needed to fix it.

The model had hardcoded numbers everywhere, no breakdown of sales or marketing plans, and no scenario analysis. Assumptions were spread across multiple sheets instead of one place. Revenue growth and cash numbers didn’t make sense - they were way too optimistic without proper backing from a sales plan. They were preparing for a seed round, but the model wasn’t strong enough to support serious investor conversations. Investors asked tough questions - and the answers weren’t clear.

✅ What We Did

• Spent a few hours locating the issues and understanding the founder’s growth plans
• Built separate sheets for revenue model, capitalisation of costs, fixed assets , etc. to remove all hardcoded data
• Rebuilt the financial statements so everything matched
• Moved all key assumptions into one place
• Added a unit economics sheet
• Adjusted the growth plan to reflect something more realistic. (For example: growing from £1m to £5m in one year doesn’t work. At early stage, you usually triple yearly revenue in the first 2–3 years, then start doubling)

📈 The Result

The founder felt much more confident going into investor meetings. The new model gave a clear picture of how they’d use the funds, how fast they could grow, and what success looked like.

Every number had logic behind it and investors could see that.

They successfully raised £1.5m.

💬 Founder Quote

“Having a proper model changed the tone of the meetings - it showed we knew our numbers and had a real plan.”