In 2019, I decided to exit my digital marketing agency, moved back to India and started building something completely different — a company that could turn agricultural waste into sustainable alternatives to single-use plastic. I began with hemp in the mountains of Uttarakhand, working with farmers and figuring out what was even possible. The work was exciting, but it was also expensive.

My agency exit gave me a runway, but it wasn’t going to last forever. And everywhere I looked, startups were raising capital. Fintech rounds. SaaS deals. Edtech mega-raises. That’s when I too started trying to raise funding.

I didn’t know how to write a pitch deck. I didn’t know what a cap table was. I didn’t know that the next five years would involve 106 investor rejections before Ukhi — my biomaterials startup — closed a $1.2 million seed round led by 100Unicorns, with backing from Venture Catalysts and debt financing from SIDBI. Those 106 conversations weren’t a wall I hit and then broke through. They were a slow, grinding education. Here is what I learned along the way.

This is what those 106 conversations taught me.

I had real skin in the game. I had moved to the remote mountains of Uttarakhand, not for a startup retreat, but to live with marginal farmers and understand their reality. So when I walked into investor meetings, I talked about transformation. I talked about how hemp could change livelihoods, and about how India was ignoring a crop that the rest of the world was waking up to.

I assumed that my passion would be enough — it wasn’t. No one doubted my sincerity, but sincerity isn’t what gets funded. Investors don’t fund emotion; they fund opportunities that happen to be led by passionate people.

If you’re a founder going into fundraising conversations, know this: Investors are evaluating your opportunity across at least five dimensions: market size (is this a large enough space?); scalability (can this grow without breaking?); team capability (can these people actually execute?); defensibility (what stops someone else from doing this?); and distribution (how do you reach customers repeatedly and cheaply?).

Passion doesn’t answer any of those questions. Preparation does.

This was a harder lesson because I didn’t even know what I didn’t know.

I had never raised institutional money before. I had no idea how venture math works. And I was pitching in agritech, which is a sector that receives roughly 2% of all venture capital flowing into Indian startups.

There are over 4,000 agritech companies in India. The sector has not produced a single unicorn. Most investors I met didn’t even have agritech in their thesis. On top of that, I was pitching hemp, a crop that policymakers will support in private conversations but won’t endorse publicly.

Uttarakhand was the first and (for a long time) the only state to legalize hemp cultivation. That meant my entire supply chain was locked into one geography, and every investor flagged the same concern: Where is the scalability?

I didn’t know how to answer that in the language they needed to hear it. My first few decks fell apart under questioning. Before I could pitch again with any credibility, I had to go back and learn how venture economics actually works, what return expectations look like at different stages, what metrics investors benchmark against in agritech and how they price risk in a sector where most bets don’t pay off.

That education didn’t come from a course. It came from the 106 conversations themselves.

For the first stretch of my fundraising journey, I was pitching as a solo founder. But investors kept asking the same question in different ways: Who else is on this team? Where is your supply chain person? If there’s a tech component, who is building it?

At first, it felt unfair. I was doing everything myself and making progress. Why wasn’t that enough? I eventually understood the principle behind the pattern. A strong team with an imperfect idea can course-correct. A weak team with a brilliant idea usually can’t.

Then I brought on a co-founder from the industry. He is someone who brought deep operational expertise and complemented my strengths as a hustler and evangelist. The conversations changed immediately. It wasn’t “Vishal’s passion project” anymore. It was two people with complementary skills building something together.

That shift made investors take the business more seriously than any slide in my deck ever had. If you are building something today, look at your founding team through an investor’s eyes.

Focus matters more than ambition. In my early pitches, I talked about everything hemp could do: textiles, nutrition, seeds, oil, sustainable packaging, farmer livelihoods and export potential. I was genuinely excited about the breadth of the opportunity. Hemp has thousands of applications. I could see a future in every single one of them — but investors didn’t share that excitement.

When I walked them through multiple product lines and a sweeping vision, I could see their attention drift. They couldn’t tell what the company actually was. Early-stage investors don’t fund breadth; they fund depth. They want to know that you can win one narrow fight before you take on a broader war.

The turning point came when I stripped the pitch down to one product, one market and one clear path to scale. The day I started talking about a single-focused offering, investors started listening.

If you are raising at the early stage, resist the temptation to show everything you can do. Show the one thing you will do first. Show that you can execute against it. The rest of the vision can unfold later.

I spent months sending cold emails, LinkedIn messages, filling out forms on investor websites and reaching out through every channel I could find. Most went unanswered.

My first angel investment didn’t come from a cold email. It came through a recommendation from IIT Mandi Catalyst, a technology business incubator in Himachal Pradesh that has supported hundreds of early-stage startups across agritech, biotech and deep tech. They had worked with me, seen my progress on the ground and believed in the opportunity.

When they introduced me to an investor, the dynamic was completely different from any cold pitch I had ever made. The investor wasn’t screening me. They were listening, because someone credible had already said, “This founder is worth your time.” That single introduction changed my entire trajectory.

If you are a founder trying to raise capital, especially in a space that investors don’t naturally gravitate toward, your job is not just to build a great company — it’s to build relationships with people who can vouch for you, such as incubators, accelerators and mentors in the ecosystem. And most importantly, build relationships with founders who have already been funded by the investor you want to reach.

Founders who treat the process as an education rather than a transaction are the ones who eventually get through. The rejections are not the obstacle. The rejections are the curriculum. And if you pay attention, 105 of them can teach you more about your business than any accelerator programme or startup playbook ever will.