fig 0. wire(pre-seed + seed) = $7M
Most founders pick investors by brand. We picked ours by Venn diagram.
When **Ezequiel Sculli** (my Darwin co-founder) and I went out to raise our pre-seed, we sat down and listed two things on a whiteboard: what we were already great at, and what we knew we lacked. The first list was long enough to feel comfortable. The second list told us exactly which checks to chase.
## what we had
We're builders. Capitalize us correctly and we ship: we find problems people pay for, we put together teams, motivate them, delegate, manage the boring middle. That's been true at Sirena, it's true at Darwin. **Building is the part of the job we know.**
## what we didn't have
Two gaps, named honestly:
1. **Fundraising muscle.** Neither of us is a born fundraiser. We close founders, customers, and operators all day. We don't naturally enjoy running a 60-investor process, and we needed people on the cap table whose job it is to be aggressive about the next round.
2. **Country-specific connections.** We knew Latam mid-market because we'd shipped to it before. We didn't have enterprise networks in every country we wanted to operate in, and we had thin US presence — both for late-stage capital and for the AI-frontier conversation in San Francisco.
Two gaps. So we drew three circles.
## the three circles
- **Building.** What Ezequiel and I already had.
- **Fundraising.** The muscle to import.
- **Connections in Latam + US.** Geographic reach, country by country.
Three circles. We sit in the first one. Every investor we picked had to land somewhere in the other two.
Pick each investor to complete a circle. Don't pick by brand — pick by gap-fill.
## the fills, round by round
**Pre-seed (Feb 2024, $2.5M, Canary led):**[^1]
- **Canary** (Brazil) — fundraising muscle plus enterprise connection in our biggest market.
- **Bridge** — now **Nazca** after the 2025 merger[^2] (Mexico) — local presence in MX.
- **Dalus Capital** (Mexico) — second MX connection layer.
- **H20 Capital Innovation** (Mexico + Miami) — bridge between MX corporate and US LP capital.
- **Latitud** (Latam → US) — the funnel from Latam operators to US capital. They're not just money; they're a network of LP relationships.
- **FJ Labs** (NYC) — Fabrice Grinda's fund. NYC presence, marketplace pattern recognition, and a fundraising muscle that has compounded over decades.
**Seed (Aug 2025, $4.5M, Base10 led):**[^3]
- **Base10 Partners** (San Francisco) — the SF + AI-frontier connection layer. Base10 sits inside the conversation that decides which AI companies are real and which are demos. We needed that reach to keep building inside the wave, not adjacent to it.
Each name above is in our cap table because they fill a specific region of the Venn. None is there for the brand alone.
## the methodology
If you're a founder about to raise, run the same exercise:
1. List what you and your co-founder are individually great at. Be honest. Strengths only — no aspirational lines.
2. List what's missing. Geography, function, network, fundraising aggressiveness, public profile, regulatory access — whatever you actually need but don't have.
3. Name each gap as a circle.
4. Pick each investor to fill a circle, or an intersection.
**Don't pick investors by brand. Pick them to complete the team you and your co-founder aren't.**
The cap table is the most permanent team you'll ever build. Build it like a team.
[^1]: TechCrunch, *Darwin AI gives small LatAm companies AI-powered sales assistant*, Feb 26, 2024 — confirms the $2.5M pre-seed and the lead-investor list.
[^2]: Bloomberg / LatamList, *Latam VCs Nazca and Bridge Merge to Combine $300 Million in Assets*, March 2025.
[^3]: Axios Pro / FinSMEs / LatamList, *Darwin AI raises $4.5M seed round led by Base10 Partners*, Aug 2025.