For a long time, fundraising has been disorganised, especially at the early stage. I've seen very long cap tables that became unmanageable as companies move up the alphabet. This often leads to costly legal fees, a lot of time coordinating investors, and, if you get lucky enough to sell your company, collecting all those signatures can delay the deal and, in some cases, jeopardise it.
I'm not evangelising against small checks. It's the complete opposite. I believe in the power of small checks to help companies get off the ground. When you start a company, your first believers are usually your friends, family, and colleagues who use their hard-earned savings to support you. That comes in the form of small checks. $1k here, $5k there, and it comes together very quickly to give you that first $50k or $100k to get your first customers and enough runway to leave your job, start generating revenue and build traction to show professional investors.
Small checks matter now more than ever because traction matters. Up to 2023, we saw many founders raise capital with just an idea and a shiny pitch deck. That doesn't fly anymore. Many founders have since tried to build traction for their idea on the side because they aren't sure they'll raise capital and don't have the luxury of leaving their job to live on savings for a few months.
My first round was literally friends and family. I left Stripe at the end of March 2023, and the first person I pitched was my former boss. He invested $20,000. That gave me the confidence to pitch more people. Naturally, I pitched the HoaQ community because we had been co-investing together for about three years. Another HNI gave us $25k, I put in $25k, alongside a couple more angels. That brought us to a total of $150k, around 18 months of runway.
When you look closely at the HoaQ community raise, it was a collection of $1ks, $5ks and $10ks. This is literally the network I had built over the previous three years, and many of those investors had seen my work ethic firsthand. They didn't invest because I had the brightest idea. They invested because they believed I could figure out how to build technology to democratise group investing.
One thing we've done really well at HoaQ is finding a way to invest as one entity. Regardless of how many investors participate in a round, there is always one entity on the cap table. We've had founders ask us to help keep their cap tables clean because they have friends who want to invest in their rounds, but that's not HoaQ's business. We've also had founders who sent their friends to HoaQ so they could invest alongside our community. While this helped us gain new members, they were never sticky because those investors weren't really HoaQ members. HoaQ's entity was just a means to an end for them.
Fast forward to 2025. As I was raising my pre-seed, I spoke to many angels outside my direct network, and many of them came in with small checks. I appreciated every single one, but I didn't want to crowd the cap table. So we set up a roll-up vehicle to organise all the small checks. That gave birth to a new product called Raise by Borderless. To date, we've helped organise over $750k for founders and project owners. It's affordable and straightforward, especially for founders.
Before Raise, a founder would pitch every investor, share a data room, go back and forth over email, and if the investor decided to invest, they'd send bank details, the investor would send funds, and then everyone would sign documents. This process doesn't change whether someone is investing $1k or $100k. That's easily two to three hours per investor and when you add it up across a round, it becomes a significant chunk of time.
There's another layer to this that most people don't talk about. Most African and diaspora founders hold their companies in Delaware or the UK, which means funds need to be deposited into a US or UK bank account. But the friends and family of African founders are mostly in Africa, with access to NGN, KES, GHS and other local currencies. They're now being asked to go to the bank, buy USD or GBP, and wire it to a foreign account, only for the founder to turn around and send it back home to spend. It's a lot to ask of someone writing a $2k check.
We're changing all of this with Raise.
If you're raising from friends, family and angels, you no longer have to go through that entire process. We help you set up your Raise page with your deck, memo, data room and any other information that helps your investor make a decision. Once they're ready to invest, you share your Raise link, and they handle everything on Borderless. From reviewing documents to sending funds, in their local currency. If your investor is in Kenya, they can invest via mobile money or bank transfer in KES. On the backend, we convert that to USD or GBP at the best available rate, saving them hours of admin and toil. Once the round closes, we handle the document signing and wire the funds. A process that used to take 20 to 30 hours across 10 investors now takes about 15 minutes.
Raise is the product I wished existed, so we built it, all on the Borderless infrastructure.
In December 2025, we worked with a founder to close their round with a group of friends. They had the option to do it manually or use Raise. The round closed in under a week, with funds wired and all documents signed.
Raise isn't just for founders, though. I'll cover that in the next article.
Learn more at www.onborderless.com/raise