Why a raise is a sales cycle, the one-line question that disqualifies an investor, and the timeline nobody warns you about.

Nobody tells founders they can end an investor conversation. So they take every meeting, chase every maybe, and spend months on people who were never going to write a cheque.

We asked Zimi CEO Michael Maas, who has raised around R50m across grants, development finance and equity, how he actually runs a raise…

Michael’s framing is that fundraising is a sales cycle in every meaningful respect: intros at the top, qualification in the middle, and a close at the end. It’s also a skill set in its own right, involving how you frame the company, how you talk to investors and whether you understand the language they use. Which means it can be learned and improved, rather than something that either happens to you or doesn’t.

Track investors the way you track deals, moving from intro to first meeting to diligence to close, with a clear view of who sits where. Founders who keep it all in their head lose track of who owes them an answer, and mistake a busy calendar for a healthy pipeline. Stages also tell you where the raise is really stuck, which is usually earlier than it feels.

This is Michael’s sharpest move and it costs one question. Investors have to go and raise money too, and plenty are taking meetings while still fundraising themselves. So he asks early whether they’ve raised their fund, and if they don’t have capital, he disqualifies them immediately and moves on. It sounds blunt until you count the months founders lose to enthusiastic people with nothing to deploy.

Every sales function has vocabulary that signals whether you belong in the room, and venture is no different. Knowing how to frame the company, which metrics matter at your stage, and what the terms actually mean is a learnable skill rather than an innate talent. Founders who skip it spend their early meetings being educated instead of being evaluated.

The most expensive misjudgment is timing. If it’s going well, an institutional raise still takes 12 to 18 months, which means a founder with three to six months of runway who starts raising now is already too late. Angels are the exception and can close fast; Zimi closed some within a month. Start the process long before the cash pressure, because urgency is visible and it prices badly.

The other lever is revenue, and Michael’s observation is that when your back’s against the wall you’d be surprised how innovative you get at selling now and getting paid upfront. It’s also the guard against what one panellist called startup theatre: decks, panels and pitch competitions that feel like progress while the business stands still. Fill the customer pipeline properly and you may find funding is less urgent than you thought, since funding isn’t really there to build; it’s there to grow.

Run it as a pipeline and the raise stops being a mystery you wait out. You know who’s real, you stop funding other people’s fundraising with your own time, and you’re negotiating from revenue rather than from three months of runway.

Michael’s full talk from Founder Collab Live is available to members inside the Founder Collab, where he goes further than we could cover here:

You’ll also get access to 40+ masterclasses from SA founders and operators on sales, fundraising, UX, paid media and more inside The Founder Collab.

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