Funding is the lifeblood of any business. The source of this funding, at least while starting up, can be anyone from friends and family, to a venture capitalist, an angel investor, or even a customer. While the source of seed funding at the start can be one of these, as these startups grow, they gravitate towards one primary source of funding for their growth. India’s SaaS ecosystem has inspiring lessons in each of these categories. While the majority of them have VCs fuelling their growth, a rare few such as Zoho and Wingify chose to stay funded on their own, bootstrapping their existence and growth. There are also some great examples of companies such as BrowserStack that chose to stay bootstrapped for the first few years and later went for VC funding. It’s difficult to offer a straight answer to the question about which funding route you should take if starting up today.
We bring you insights from both—founders of VCfunded companies and bootstrapped startups—in this chapter.
