The Fundraising Journey For NuBrakes & Raising $16M+ From Top Investors Like Canvas Ventures

the fundraising journey, right? And I know we connected from Mike at Canvas Ventures, who's awesome and is an investor. So could you maybe kind of, you know, walk us through your fundraising journey and even kind of from the beginning?

Sure. I'll try and be quick because I think I'm being a bit long-winded here. But our first round, we raised a $500K round for the car wash business about 24 months after we launched the business. And I had actually met that, and the investor who wrote the first check into that round, which was Contrary Capital, I met them like 6 months into launching the business. So we knew each other 18 months prior to him actually, you know, writing the first check into that seed round, which then parlayed into, you know, $500K. He wrote $100K and then we got $500K. So we raised that $500K round. We spent it way too quickly. Quite candidly. And that's when we kind of had our backs up against the wall and we're having to figure out, you know, do we transition over to New Breaks or something like that? We ended up launching New Breaks and within 3 months, 90 days, we were at a $500K annualized run rate growing, you know, like triple digits month over month, but with small numbers. And we ended up raising a $700K round from Bling Capital. In August 2019. So 3 months after launch. So that happened very quickly. We were, you know, we had like, I think $10,000 in the bank and we were just scraping by. And then we got that influx of capital from Bling. So, you know, to that point we had 2 seed rounds basically. So not particularly friendly, like from a cap table standpoint, from the founder's perspective, but it was necessary nonetheless. And then we ended up, growth continued to be strong and right as COVID onset, actually, so in the spring, so it was May, we ended up raising an additional $1.2 million on a SAFE round and we kind of called it a seed extension. It was a SAFE round. Then we raised about 6 months after that, we raised a Series A. From Canvas Ventures and Mike Ghaffari, who connected Mike and I. And then in the spring, we did an additional $4.5 million on a SAFE round right before that Series B term sheet got pulled. So we were happy to have that cash in the bank. And so we've raised a total of $16.9 to date. The most recent round was a A non-priced SAFE round. The most recent priced round was a Series A round.

Also, one note I had that I wanted to bring up on the topic of fundraising. So, you know, kind of going back to the very, to the early days and kind of starting with, you know, New Wash and then, you know, pivoting into New Breaks, how have you thought about kind of sequencing? And then when it comes to like, you know, pitching to investors, you know, starting with that kind of unique insider wedge and kind of expansion?

Yeah. So the second slide, and at which point we launched into New Breaks, The second slide in my pitch deck very quickly became like our initial beachhead is brake repair. And the reason for that was like, you know, everybody's like, well, why brake repair? Why don't you do all of these different services? Right? That's what they all want to ask. And the reality is, is that it's a combination of things. It's the margin profile. It's a matter of focus. It's a matter of doing one thing really, really well before we start, you know, expanding our scope. And so that's always my positioning is, It's not a weakness that we don't— we're not trying to capture the full $72 billion a year market. We're focusing on this $12.5 billion segment, which is brake repair. We're going to do that really, really well. Our customers are already asking us for more things, and we're telling them no right now, unfortunately, but we will tell them yes eventually. And so that's kind of my positioning. And then, yeah, so that more or less, that's kind of the positioning in a nutshell.