I Learned 5 Things After Facing Over 100 Investor Rejections

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Key Takeaways

- Passion won’t convince investors to invest in your business — coming fully prepared to answer their questions will.

- Investors want to see what your team will look like, and who’s on it.

- Getting an investor recommendation from another founder, if possible, can be crucial for getting your foot in the door.

In 2019, I decided to exit my digital marketing agency, moved back to India and started building something completely different — a company that could turn agricultural waste into sustainable alternatives to single-use plastic. I began with hemp in the mountains of Uttarakhand, working with farmers and figuring out what was even possible. The work was exciting, but it was also expensive.

My agency exit gave me a runway, but it wasn’t going to last forever. And everywhere I looked, startups were raising capital. Fintech rounds. SaaS deals. Edtech mega-raises. That’s when I too started trying to raise funding.

I didn’t know how to write a pitch deck. I didn’t know what a cap table was. I didn’t know that the next five years would involve 106 investor rejections before Ukhi — my biomaterials startup — closed a $1.2 million seed round led by 100Unicorns, with backing from Venture Catalysts and debt financing from SIDBI. Those 106 conversations weren’t a wall I hit and then broke through. They were a slow, grinding education. Here is what I learned along the way.

This is what those 106 conversations taught me.

1. I believed passion would convince investors — it doesn’t

I had real skin in the game. I had moved to the remote mountains of Uttarakhand, not for a startup retreat, but to live with marginal farmers and understand their reality. So when I walked into investor meetings, I talked about transformation. I talked about how hemp could change livelihoods, and about how India was ignoring a crop that the rest of the world was waking up to.

I assumed that my passion would be enough — it wasn’t. No one doubted my sincerity, but sincerity isn’t what gets funded. Investors don’t fund emotion; they fund opportunities that happen to be led by passionate people.

If you’re a founder going into fundraising conversations, know this: Investors are evaluating your opportunity across at least five dimensions: market size (is this a large enough space?); scalability (can this grow without breaking?); team capability (can these people actually execute?); defensibility (what stops someone else from doing this?); and distribution (how do you reach customers repeatedly and cheaply?).

Passion doesn’t answer any of those questions. Preparation does.

2. I did not understand how investors evaluate startups

This was a harder lesson because I didn’t even know what I didn’t know.

I had never raised institutional money before. I had no idea how venture math works. And I was pitching in agritech, which is a sector that receives roughly 2% of all venture capital flowing into Indian startups.

There are over 4,000 agritech companies in India. The sector has not produced a single unicorn. Most investors I met didn’t even have agritech in their thesis. On top of that, I was pitching hemp, a crop that policymakers will support in private conversations but won’t endorse publicly.

Uttarakhand was the first and (for a long time) the only state to legalize hemp cultivation. That meant my entire supply chain was locked into one geography, and every investor flagged the same concern: Where is the scalability?

I didn’t know how to answer that in the language they needed to hear it. My first few decks fell apart under questioning. Before I could pitch again with any credibility, I had to go back and learn how venture economics actually works, what return expectations look like at different stages, what metrics investors benchmark against in agritech and how they price risk in a sector where most bets don’t pay off.

That education didn’t come from a course. It came from the 106 conversations themselves.

3. Investors fund teams before they fund ideas

For the first stretch of my fundraising journey, I was pitching as a solo founder. But investors kept asking the same question in different ways: Who else is on this team? Where is your supply chain person? If there’s a tech component, who is building it?

At first, it felt unfair. I was doing everything myself and making progress. Why wasn’t that enough? I eventually understood the principle behind the pattern. A strong team with an imperfect idea can course-correct. A weak team with a brilliant idea usually can’t.

Then I brought on a co-founder from the industry. He is someone who brought deep operational expertise and complemented my strengths as a hustler and evangelist. The conversations changed immediately. It wasn’t “Vishal’s passion pro