For twenty years, the deck-only pre-seed round had a justification: building software was expensive. You raised money to build the thing. Fair enough.
That justification is gone. Two founders with Cursor or Claude Code and a Cloudflare account can put a working product in front of strangers in weeks, for the cost of a few subscriptions. We see it every day in our inbox — and so does every founder you're competing with.
When building is nearly free, not having built becomes a signal.
That's why we require a working product before we invest. Not because we're tough. Because the excuse expired.
What "working" means to us
Lower than you think. We don't need polish, a design system, or a pricing page. Three users and duct tape is fine. "Working" means: real software, running, in front of at least a handful of people who aren't your friends — and you're learning from what they do with it.
What it rules out is the deck with "product: Q3" on slide nine. If you can't get a rough v1 live in the age of AI coding tools, that tells us something about the team — and it's the one thing on the slide we can't fix with a check.
What we actually weight
Once the product exists, our attention goes somewhere most funds don't put it: the insider insight. What do you know about this market that almost nobody else does? Why are you the person who knows it? The sharpest pitches we get are built around one uncomfortable fact the founder learned the hard way — eight years running a bakery chain, a decade inside a payments compliance team, a problem they personally bled on.
Conviction in the founder plus a sharp wedge into a real market beats a polished metrics slide at pre-seed. Every time. Pre-revenue is welcome. Users are a plus, not a requirement. But the product has to exist, and the insight has to be yours.
Where we invest
We write checks of $150K–$750K at pre-seed and seed, lead or co-lead, into B2B software, AI tooling, and fintech infrastructure — across nine markets: the US, Canada, the UK, the EU, Australia, India, South Korea, China, and Brazil. If you're building for one or more of them, you're in scope.
And whatever you send us, you'll hear back in 3 business days. With a reason.
Product live? Pitch it.
Rough is fine. Three users is fine. Send what's real and we'll give you a real answer.
Pitch us— Debra Stattmeier, NoRev