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How a DevTools Startup Closed a $1.4M Seed Round in 27 Days

  • Infrastructure
  • Seed
Featured-image-NeuralSync
$1.4M

Total Raised

27 Days

Time to Close

8

Investors

About

Small to mid-size dev teams struggle with fragmented infrastructure management. They juggle AWS, Vercel, Railway, Supabase, monitoring tools, and more, spending hours on DevOps instead of building features.

Riftbase is an all-in-one developer infrastructure platform: backend hosting, frontend deployment, monitoring, observability, and team collaboration tools. One dashboard, one bill, one workflow. Jake Morrison (ex-Vercel) and Sofia Rim (ex-AWS) built it to solve their own pain, then realized other developers needed it too.

The Challenge

Jake and Sofia launched an MVP, got 200 beta users in 3 months, and realized they had something real. But they had a problem: zero investor connections.

Both were engineers. Great at building product, not great at fundraising. They spent 2 months cold-emailing VCs with zero responses.

  • No warm investor intros
  • Technical product that was hard to explain in 2 sentences
  • First-time founders with no track record
  • Competitive space (Vercel, Railway, Render all well-funded)
  • Running low on savings and needed capital fast
How Swyft Fundr Helped

Week 1: Repositioning
Instead of “We’re like AWS + Vercel combined,” the pitch became: “Dev teams waste 30% of their time on infrastructure. We give them one unified platform. 200 beta users in 3 months. $49-$199/month SaaS pricing.” The deck was rebuilt to lead with the problem, show traction (200 users, 40% MoM growth, $2K MRR), explain the market, and introduce the team.

Week 2-3: Investor Matching
Matched to 14 investors: 5 dev-tool focused VCs, 6 angels (ex-CTOs from Stripe, GitHub, Vercel), and 3 early-stage funds. Conversion: 14 matched, 11 took meetings, 6 showed interest, 3 committed.

Week 4: Closing
Lead investor (dev-tools VC) offered $800K at $6M post-money. Angel syndicate via SPV pooled $600K. Total: $1.4M. Signed. Wired. Done in 27 days.

The Results
  • Capital Raised: 1.4M
  • Timeline: 27 days
  • Investors: 8
  • Cost: $48K ($6K + 3% success fee on White Glove tier)
“We’re engineers, not fundraisers. Swyft Fundr handled everything. The repositioning work was critical, our old pitch was way too technical. The investor matching was perfect. Every VC we talked to understood dev tools and moved fast. 27 days from approval to wire. Unreal.”

Jake Morrison

Co-Founder, Riftbase

What Swyft Fundr Provided
  • Pitch deck rebuild and repositioning
  • Financial model creation
  • Investor matching (14 targeted intros)
  • SPV structuring for angel syndicate
  • Negotiation support and closing
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