Title: I founded an vertical-focused enterprise startup. We signed a few huge customers in the space on a build-and-beta basis, and that led to industry awards and a full pipeline of leads and signed contracts for installation (SaaS pricing with small implementation fee).<p>We&#x27;ve done it with a ridiculously small team, however. And it&#x27;s become impossible to handle the dev and deployment, support and training, security reviews, feature requests, etc. So we are looking at options.<p>We&#x27;ve been approached by a few large companies in the industry regarding acquisition. It looks like we could sell for $12-14M. Kind of exciting, but also well under the value that&#x27;s possible (which would probably be something north of $400M in our industry alone, with the possibility to move laterally).<p>The alternative is to raise money. We&#x27;ve put together a solid deck and model (I think), but the local venture capital scene is not great (think $1M+ ARR).<p>We think this is a product ripe for SV firms, but those critical &quot;warm introductions&quot; are elusive. We just don&#x27;t have the network. Only 4% of my cold emails have even been opened (yes, we track it).<p>It&#x27;s crazy to me that our industry is jumping up and down for our product, we&#x27;ve got offers to buy the company, but we can&#x27;t raise a seed. I&#x27;ve failed hard here. I&#x27;m open for advice.
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