🧞How Movement Labs got $38 million in funding

And how can you do it too

Jun 03, 2024

GM and happy Monday frens🖖

We know many future founders and people think about starting their own company reading this. Inevitably, you will have to raise some money. And that's hard to do, even if you have a great product.

To help, we asked a few questions of the co-founder of Movement Labs, who recently raised $38 million in funding.

Enjoy:

🎉 Must-see two July and one June events
💰 Raising funds like a pro
📰 This week's news

⛓️Conference about infrastructure & Layer 2s

Event for all people building on ETH & BTC with the best lineup ever. Here's a little sneak peek:

Mustafa AI-Bassam, Co-Founder & CEO @ Celestia
Jordi Baylina, Co-founder @ Polygon
Harry Kalodner, Co-founder & CTO @ Offchain Labs
Zac Williamson, CEO & Co-Founder @ Aztec
Erick de Moura, Co-Founder @ Cartesi
Anurag Arjun, Co-Founder @ Avail

And many more founders and leads...

🗓July 9, Brussels

🥩Option for restaking fans

Restaking & Infra Day is a one-day event for web3 developers, tech founders and non-technical web3 enthusiasts who want to dive deeper into the rapidly developing field of restaking technologies & solutions.

Listen to speakers from Eigen, Picasso, Etherfi, Trust Wallet, ZettaBlock and others!

🗓July 8, Brussels

Get me a ticket

🌎Join to Explore Real-World Use Cases in B2B Blockchain

Come chat about the latest in corporate blockchain adoption with industry experts and startup founders at the online conference, "Startups in Action: Blockchain Redefining Corporate Frontiers", hosted by Vis Caeli and Igniteers.

Discover real-world use cases and learn about emerging trends in B2B blockchain integration on June 6, at 4pm (WEST).

🤿Deep-dive: How to raise stacks of cash

Movement Labs developed the Movement SDK, a versatile framework for building and deploying Move-based infrastructure, applications, and blockchains in any distributed environment.

The team offers a range of products and services that enable non-Move protocols to leverage the power of the Move programming language without having to write Move code.

The Movement Labs recently raised 38 million dollars. Here is how they did it.

The full version is here.

What worked best for you for finding investors?

Being based in New York. New York has one of the highest concentration of venture capitalists.

If you want to meet with a firm in person, you can go directly to their office and explain your vision.

Also, going to every happy hour and dinner helped me meet the people I wanted to meet. From there, I was able to build a network and find people we liked. Then I was able to pick a partner that made the most sense.

Was fundraising a full-time job?

It was a full-time job for me.

I'm fortunate to have a great relationship with a Cooper, my co-founder, where Cooper was more internal, kept on the floor, while I did most of the investor relations.

It was a full-time job networking with investors, meeting with them, understanding the narrative they want and working with a team to come up with good distribution plans in the market.

I think it's always a full-time job trying to understand what the market wants and to steer the company in a more fruitful direction.

What is the main reason why investors believed in your project?

The community.

At the end of the day, technology is technology. The question is, how do you scale and get adoption?

One thing we've done really well is go-to-market distribution. We have a great community. It's very vibrant and really excited to work with us from day one.

That's a part of how we build a narrative. So far it's been really successful on the go-to-market side and the business side. We're seeing a lot of great activation from community members, especially in the Korea, Southeast Asia, Latin America regions, and we're really excited to work with them.

What was the main thing you did to build this community?

Cooper and I were builders. We were part of the community, so we knew what the community members wanted.

A lot of times in larger communities, there's a lot of oligarchy where the leadership is stripped away and it's really hard to get in touch with the foundation. There's a lot of bureaucracy. So you can't step back and be grassroot.

Me and Cooper, we respond in the discord, we say gm, etc. Being very personal with the builders shows that you actually care about them and you're not just going to throw tokens at them.

Also, you need to incentivize builders. We have a build a package net program, we have testnet programs and we've created programs where people can join the network and contribute, whether it's making memes, publishing smart contracts, making videos.

I think we've learned from a lot of great inspirations like Monad and Parachain. But we're doing this on a theme that gives us a unique angle.