Authentic’s Product-Led Fundraising: How Cole Riccardi Raised $16M Without Fundraising Strategy

Authentic’s Product-Led Fundraising: How Cole Riccardi Raised $16M Without Fundraising Strategy

Most founders treat fundraising as a parallel workstream to building their company. Cole Riccardi told his team there’s no difference between the two.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Cole Riccardi, CEO and Founder of Authentic, revealed an approach to fundraising that eliminates the traditional playbook: deck optimization, investor targeting spreadsheets, and fundraising advisors. Instead, he focused nine to twelve months on building something undeniable, then spent one to two months showing investors what they’d accomplished.

The result: 16 million dollars raised with a philosophy that inverts how most founders think about raising capital.

The Core Philosophy: Work Is Fundraising

Cole’s approach to fundraising starts with a statement he repeats to his team: “I have told our team over the last nine months that the work we do right now is for fundraising, because if you build a great business and are able to tell a great story, then you will be able to raise money.”

This isn’t motivational rhetoric. It’s a strategic framework that changes how you allocate founder time and energy. “I think everyone has a different strategy to fundraising,” Cole acknowledges, but his diverges sharply from the conventional wisdom.

The conventional approach treats fundraising as its own discipline. Founders spend weeks perfecting their deck, mapping investor networks, crafting different versions of their story for different stages of firms, and strategizing about timing and sequencing. Cole’s approach renders most of this irrelevant.

“If you’re able to go into fundraising meetings and show an awesome product and awesome traction, that will make it a successful fundraising process,” he explains. “Whereas I think a lot of folks will spend a lot of time on strategy around the fundraise process itself.”

The implication is profound: the delta between a successful fundraise and a failed one isn’t fundraising tactics—it’s the quality of what you built in the months before you started fundraising.

The Nine-Month Preparation Period

When Cole talks about “the work we do right now is for fundraising,” he’s describing a nine to twelve month period of heads-down building. This isn’t product development in a vacuum—it’s building with a clear understanding of what story you need to tell investors.

“But I really think what matters is the 9 to 12, however many months preparing for that fundraiser. It’s the actual work, it’s the actual company building,” Cole emphasizes.

During this period, Authentic focused on several things that would become proof points in fundraising conversations: launching their captive insurance platform, signing initial customers, building regulatory infrastructure, and demonstrating that vertical software companies and franchisors would actually adopt this model.

The discipline is focusing on accomplishments that matter for the fundraising story, not just shipping features. Every company can build features. Authentic needed to prove they could navigate insurance regulation, attract enterprise customers in a down market, and deliver a product complex enough that competitors couldn’t easily replicate it.

This preparation period is front-loaded investment. You’re spending months building without raising, which means burning your existing runway or operating on limited capital. But the payoff is a compressed fundraising timeline and higher probability of success when you do raise.

What Slow Ventures Saw in the Early Bet

Before the Series A, Slow Ventures made an early bet on Cole when he had almost nothing tangible. This seems to contradict the product-led approach—but actually reveals what matters when you don’t yet have product and traction.

“I was really passionate about this idea. I still obviously am,” Cole explains. “It’s obvious to me, maybe more people in my demographic that I would rather buy insurance through a trusted channel that I already interact with, as opposed to some insurance brand that I haven’t worked with.”

Slow Ventures saw conviction—the kind that comes from deep domain expertise. Cole had spent six years at Aquiline working with companies trying to solve this exact problem. “I think they candidly just saw my conviction level in it and the fact that I had been in this space for six or seven years. And so I think that’s what really prompted them to write the check.”

When you’re pre-product, conviction and domain expertise are your traction. But once you have the ability to build product and sign customers, those become the story. The early bet was on Cole’s vision and experience. The Series A was on what Authentic had accomplished.

The CEO’s Responsibility in Fundraising

Cole sees one specific role for the CEO in fundraising: making sure investors can see the work. “It’s the CEO’s responsibility to make sure everyone can see all of the accomplishments and all of the traction in that month or a couple of months of fundraising.”

This is different from storytelling in the narrative sense. It’s not about spin or positioning. It’s about clarity—ensuring the impressive work your team did is visible and understandable to people who don’t live in your business every day.

This manifests in several ways. The demo needs to be polished enough that investors immediately grasp the value. The metrics need to be packaged so the growth story is obvious. The regulatory accomplishments need to be framed as IP and moat-building, not just compliance. Customer stories need to show not just adoption but enthusiasm and results.

The CEO isn’t creating a fundraising narrative separate from reality. They’re translating the work into terms investors can evaluate and get excited about. If the work is strong, this translation is straightforward. If the work is weak, no amount of CEO effort can compensate.

The Anti-Strategy Strategy

What makes Cole’s approach work is what it eliminates. “Whereas I think a lot of folks will spend a lot of time on strategy around the fundraise process itself,” he observes, noting this as the path he didn’t take.

The traditional fundraising playbook includes investor pipeline management, multi-threaded outreach, cultivating warm intros, timing announcements to create momentum, and orchestrating multiple term sheets for negotiation leverage. None of this is inherently wrong, but it’s effort that could be spent building.

Cole’s bet is that if your product and traction are compelling enough, the fundraising strategy largely takes care of itself. Investors hear about you. They reach out. The conversations are shorter because the proof points speak for themselves. You spend less time convincing and more time choosing.

This only works if the underlying work is truly exceptional. You can’t phone in product development for nine months and expect a great fundraising outcome just because you skipped traditional investor relations. The anti-strategy is actually the highest-bar strategy—it demands that your work be undeniable.

When Product-Led Fundraising Works

Cole’s approach isn’t universal. Three conditions need to be true:

You’re in a market where traction is definitive. In some markets, early traction clearly signals product-market fit. Authentic signing multiple vertical software companies and franchisors for a complex, regulated product is meaningful signal. In other markets, early metrics are more ambiguous.

You have enough runway for the prep period. Building for nine to twelve months before fundraising requires capital. This works if you raised a strong seed round, are capital-efficient, or have other funding sources. If you’re three months from running out of money, you can’t execute this approach.

Your product demonstrates clear value quickly. Investors need to see results from the preparation period. If your sales cycle is 18 months and implementation takes another 12, you can’t show compelling traction in nine months of building.

When these conditions exist, product-led fundraising is higher leverage than traditional approaches. When they don’t, you need the full fundraising playbook.

The Compound Effect of Focus

The deeper insight in Cole’s approach is about focus and compounding. Every hour spent optimizing your pitch deck is an hour not spent improving your product. Every coffee chat with a potential investor is time away from customer conversations.

For most founders, these tradeoffs are unavoidable—you need to fundraise while building. But Cole’s approach minimizes context switching. For nine months, the team focuses on one thing: building an exceptional company. Then for one to two months, they focus on showing investors what they built.

This creates compounding in both directions. During the building phase, there’s no cognitive overhead from fundraising. The team moves faster. During fundraising, you’re not trying to build and raise simultaneously, so you can be fully present in investor conversations.

The Result: Successful Fundraising as Byproduct

Authentic raised 16 million dollars for their Series A. But in Cole’s framing, that’s not because they executed great fundraising strategy. It’s because they built a great business, and fundraising was the natural result.

“If you build a great business and are able to tell a great story, then you will be able to raise money,” Cole states simply. The causation runs in one direction: great business enables great fundraising. Not the reverse.

This challenges the startup narrative that fundraising is a skill separate from company building. In Cole’s model, they’re the same skill. Building a company investors want to fund is fundraising. Everything else is just communication.

The Tactical Implication

If you adopt this approach, your calendar changes. Instead of blocking off 20% of your time for investor relations across twelve months, you block off 100% of two months after nine months of building.

Instead of “we should have something to show investors by Q3,” the goal becomes “we should have undeniable traction by Q3, then we’ll raise in Q4.”

Instead of maintaining a CRM of investor relationships, you focus on customer relationships and regulatory relationships and product quality—the things that will make investors want to meet you.

The risk is that you build for nine months and discover your traction isn’t compelling. But that’s not a fundraising failure—it’s a product-market fit failure, and you’d rather discover it at month nine than month eighteen with a mediocre fundraise keeping you alive artificially.

For technical founders who’d rather build than schmooze, Cole’s approach offers permission to focus on what you’re good at. Just make sure what you’re building is exceptional.