How to raise a pre-seed round in Europe
The mechanical guide to raising pre-seed in Europe: when to start, what to prepare, how to build the investor list, and how to close - calibrated against real round data.
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To raise a pre-seed round in Europe, start the process while you still have at least nine months of runway, budget three to six months for the raise itself, and run a tight parallel process with angels and pre-seed funds around a clear story of why your team will find product-market fit – knowing that the median pre-seed across the rounds Sesamers tracks is €1.6M, but real rounds start as low as €424k.
Pre-seed is the round where the folklore is least useful, because there is the least data and the most survivor bias. Below, I walk through the mechanical version: when to start, what to prepare, who to talk to, and how to close. If you are still working out what pre-seed even is, read our pre-seed explainer first – this article assumes you know you need one.
Are you actually ready to raise?
Investors at pre-seed are buying a team and a thesis, not metrics – but “no metrics required” does not mean “no evidence required”. The readiness signals that matter:
- A committed founding team. Full-time, or with a hard date to go full-time on funding. A round assembled around a part-time team is the single most common quiet rejection.
- Evidence of pull, however small. A waitlist that grew without spend, five design partners who take your calls, a prototype someone used twice without being asked. At pre-seed, quality of evidence beats quantity.
- A specific, falsifiable thesis. “We believe X buyers will pay for Y because Z changed” is fundable; “the market is huge” is not.
- A reason it’s you. Earned insight from the industry, the technology, or a previous failure. First-time founders raise pre-seeds constantly; founders without a story about why them rarely do.
The timeline, worked backwards
As a rule of thumb, a raise takes three to six months, and you should start with at least nine months of runway. Why so early? Because a raise that starts with six months of cash ends with you negotiating from desperation, and investors can smell it. Worked backwards, your plan looks like this:
| Runway remaining | What you should be doing |
|---|---|
| 9+ months | Decide to raise. Build the list, tighten the deck, warm up the intros you will need. Start grant applications now – they run slower than the round. |
| 8-7 months | First partner meetings. Run them in parallel, not sequence – the round has momentum or it has nothing. |
| 6-5 months | Second meetings, diligence, first term sheet ideally lands here. Use it to compress everyone else’s timeline. |
| 4-3 months | Close and paper the round. Legals at pre-seed should be measured in weeks, not months – see instruments below. |
The honest caveat: three to six months is a rule of thumb, not a law. Hot rounds close in weeks; cold ones die slowly over a year. The planning number matters because you cannot know in advance which one yours is.
Materials: three documents, no more
The deck. Ten to fifteen slides: problem, insight, product, evidence of pull, market logic, team, ask. At pre-seed the deck’s job is to earn a meeting, not to close the round – over-produced decks with sparse substance read as compensation.
The data room, lite. Pre-seed diligence is thin, but having a folder ready – incorporation documents, cap table, any pilot agreements or letters of intent, a simple financial model – signals operational competence and shortens the close by weeks. What investors are checking at this stage is mostly that nothing is broken: clean cap table, sensible founder equity split, no strange previous instruments.
The update email. The most underused fundraising tool in Europe, and I do not understand why we leave it on the table. Start a monthly investor update before you raise, send it to every investor you meet, and let three months of visible progress do the persuading. An investor who has watched you ship is materially easier to close than one meeting you cold.
Building the list
A European pre-seed round is usually assembled from two or three pools: angels (often operators from your industry), dedicated pre-seed funds, and occasionally a seed fund writing an early cheque. Build a list of 50-80 names, then rank them by actual fit – stage, sector, geography, cheque size – rather than by fame. A fund that leads pre-seeds in your vertical is worth twenty famous seed funds that “occasionally do pre-seed”, because the latter mostly means no.
Two practical rules. First, warm introductions still convert far better than cold outreach, and the best introducers are founders the investor already backed – which is another use for those update emails. Second, qualify the money: ask angels whether they have made an investment in the last twelve months, and ask funds where they are in their fund cycle. A sympathetic investor with no dry powder costs you a month. Our most active investors ranking exists to solve exactly this problem – it shows who is actually writing cheques, not who has a website saying so.
Run grants in parallel, not instead
Europe’s real structural advantage at pre-seed is non-dilutive money: national innovation agencies, regional schemes and EU instruments that can add hundreds of thousands to a round without costing a share. Unlike in the US, this track genuinely exists here – and we keep making the same mistake with it: treating grants as an alternative to raising. Grant timelines are long and their milestones are bureaucratic, so a company that only pursues grants moves at grant speed. Treat them as a parallel track instead: start applications when you start the raise, and let whichever lands first strengthen the other. A granted company raises on better terms; a funded company clears grant co-financing requirements more easily. The full landscape is in our guide to startup grants in Europe.
Choosing the instrument
Most European pre-seeds are done on pre-priced instruments – SAFEs, convertible notes, or France’s BSA-AIR – because pricing a company this early is mostly theatre and the legal costs of a priced round eat a meaningful slice of a small raise. The choice between them is partly geography (UK and international investors know SAFEs; French rounds often use the BSA-AIR; notes persist where investors want debt-holder protections) and partly about caps, discounts and what happens when instruments stack. That is its own topic: read SAFE vs convertible note vs BSA-AIR before you sign anything, because the terms you accept at pre-seed quietly set your dilution at seed.
Calibration: what a pre-seed looks like in numbers
Across the rounds Sesamers tracks, the median pre-seed is €1.6M (n=33), with rounds starting from €424k. Treat the spread as the real information: a €500k angel round and a €2M institutional pre-seed are both normal, and the right size is the one that buys 18-24 months of runway to seed-worthy evidence – not the biggest number someone will sign. On dilution, the rule of thumb is that rounds price at 15-25% of post-money whatever the stage; if the maths of your target amount implies giving up much more than that, the fix is usually a smaller round or a milestone first, not a louder pitch.
Closing mechanics
Rounds close on momentum. Once you have a lead – or an anchor angel covering a third of the round – set a closing date and tell everyone. Pre-priced instruments let you close in tranches, which is useful, but resist the temptation to let a round dribble in over six months: every week of “still raising” costs founder attention, and stale rounds acquire a smell. Chase signatures and transfers with the same energy you chased meetings; a verbal yes is worth nothing until the money arrives. And send the update email the week after closing – the investors who said no this time are the warm top of your seed list.
One last thing. The good news is that a European pre-seed has never been more raisable: the angels exist, the pre-seed funds exist, and the non-dilutive track runs alongside both. The goal was never the round, though – a closed pre-seed is permission to go find product-market fit, nothing more. Plan early, run it tight, then put the money to work!
Frequently asked questions
How much should I raise at pre-seed?
Enough to reach seed-worthy evidence with 18-24 months of runway, sized against the 15-25% dilution rule of thumb. Across the rounds Sesamers tracks the median is €1.6M, but rounds from €424k up are normal – the milestone, not the median, sets your number.
Do I need revenue to raise a pre-seed in Europe?
No, but you need evidence of pull – design partners, a growing waitlist, usage of a prototype. European investors do tend to want more proof per euro than the US folklore suggests, so the stronger your evidence, the shorter your raise.
Should I take the first term sheet I get?
Not automatically, but use it immediately: a live term sheet is the strongest forcing function in fundraising. Give other investors a real deadline measured in days or a couple of weeks. Just do not bluff – investors compare notes, and a fake deadline that passes quietly damages the round.
What kills pre-seed rounds most often?
Starting too late, running investors in sequence instead of parallel, and messy foundations – a strange cap table, an uncommitted co-founder, or previous instruments with aggressive terms. All three are preventable months before the first meeting.
Keep going
For the conceptual grounding, start with what is a startup and what is pre-seed funding. When you are choosing paperwork, read SAFE vs convertible note vs BSA-AIR, and put the non-dilutive track alongside it with startup grants in Europe. To see who is actually writing cheques right now, use our most active investors hub.
