“Our email goes directly to junk.”

“If an entrepreneur is not introduced to me, I don’t talk to them.”

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These are some of the reactions I got from my peers when I first became an investor. After being an entrepreneur for over 20 years, I decided to join the other side for reasons you will understand through this article. When I look back at my days as an early-stage founder, I heard different things:

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“You need to talk to at least 100 investors to get a real market opinion.”

“Don’t take a refusal personally. You are great, but your idea isn’t.”

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So how does this work? It is not easy to get meaningful introductions with investors, especially as many will tend to safeguard their contacts from too much noise. As I am building soonami, I receive about 15 recommendations by people to investors. How is someone without a huge network supposed to get to 100?

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At soonami, we believe that most high-potential founders are prevented from getting the funding they need and deserve by the current system. 

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What if you’re an aspiring builder, but you are not located in one of the major cities like London, New York, Berlin, or San Francisco? What if your network is still just being built up? If your product idea is good, shouldn't it be enough for funding?

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The current VC landscape would typically favor those with a wide network–someone like a VP of Google or a senior developer of Facebook has a higher chance of getting millions in funding by presenting nothing more than a pitch deck. 

However, we believe that 99% of the talent today is outside the currently favored hotspots.

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In 2021, Crunchbase analyzed venture funding per country and per capita. While there are over 190 countries, the study only covers 24 countries with noteworthy venture funding. This only represents about 50% of the world’s population. What about the other half?

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What makes soonami.io different? We work borderless.

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We don’t care where you come from, where you went to university, or even where you work out of. All we look at is your performance.

We want to give every founder a chance to prove their dedication and ability.

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How?

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Through our first hackathon, a remote 4-day event supported by our ecosystem, founders who participate can show their ability to execute. We will directly tokenize your project and give you enough capital to pay for freelancers and advisors on our platform Foundance.

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Can you build an MVP? Can you present your idea with conviction to a jury in the English ? Does your team have good dynamics? These are the questions we care about.

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If you work in one of the underrepresented countries like Pakistan, Ethiopia, the Philippines, or anywhere else in the world, we want you to come and present your idea to us. At soonami, we care about including the countries whose entrepreneurs often miss out on funding opportunities because of a lack of access and opportunity. 

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The top projects which present their idea stand a chance to become a part of soonami’s accelerator program. The world of venture building is tough, but we would like to make it a little bit easier for those who work for it. If you are really smart, have high dedication, and have the business and technical talent on your team to pull it off, it could be you.

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Join soonami.io in our first AI hackathon. The four-day remote hackathon will commence on July 14, 2023, until July 18. If you win, you will be a part of Cohort 0 of our accelerator and qualify for bounties worth $15k. You may even secure funding of up to $500k.

👉 soonami.io/hackathon

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Sign up here for our upcoming cofounders' meetup to find out more.

👉 soonami.io/hackathon-schedule

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