Built by a Founder Who Lived the Problem

The Background

Lech Kaniuk started his first company in 2005. PizzaPortal. Online food ordering before it was normal. Before Deliveroo. Before Uber Eats. He built it in Poland. He raised money. He scaled it. He sold it. Then he did it again. iTaxi. Ride-hailing. Taxi dispatching. Same playbook. Build. Raise. Scale. Exit or grow. Then SunRoof. Solar roofs and integrated energy. A different sector. Same fundraising pain.

Five companies. Five raises. Over €150 million. That sounds like a lot. It is. But each raise started the same way. Blank spreadsheet. Empty columns. Where do we get the names? Crunchbase. LinkedIn. VC lists from friends. Scrolling. Copying. Pasting. Fund after fund. No idea if they invest at our stage. Or in our sector. Or in our geography. Add them anyway. We need a list.

A week goes by. Maybe two. We have 80 names. Half do not invest at our stage. A third are in the wrong sector. We do not know which ones until we send the email and get the rejection. Or worse, the silence. The spreadsheet grows. More columns. Last email sent. Response status. Next follow-up. We cannot see half of them on screen. We duplicate the sheet. One for active, one for cold. Then we forget which is which.

Replies come in. Some in Gmail. Some in the calendar. Some in our heads. We try to remember who said what. We forget to follow up. We send the same deck twice. The spreadsheet is out of date before the first meeting. By week six we have lost the thread on three investors who seemed warm. This happened. Every time. Across five raises. Same problem. Same chaos. No tool that actually solved it.

Why RaisePilot Exists

After the last raise, Lech sat down and wrote a book. Angel in Hell. A book about fundraising. The reality of it. The mistakes. The things no one tells you. The book came from experience. Real rounds. Real spreadsheets. Real lost threads. Writing it forced him to think about what would have helped. What would have made the process less painful. Less chaotic. Less prone to error.

The answer was not another spreadsheet template. It was not another Crunchbase export. It was not another CRM built for sales. The answer was a tool built for one thing: fundraising. Finding the right investors. Tracking the conversation. Managing the round from first email to wire. One product. Matching. Pipeline. Database. No export. No second tool. No hope.

RaisePilot is that tool. It is built from the frustration of five raises. From the hours spent scrolling databases. From the investors we forgot to follow up with. From the spreadsheet that was always wrong. It is built from what Lech needed and did not have. Not from a theory of what founders need. From what he needed. And did not have.

The core idea is simple. You should not spend weeks building an investor list. You fill in your profile. Stage, sector, geography, check size. You get a ranked list. You add investors to your pipeline. You track the conversation. You set reminders. You move deals through stages. One place. No spreadsheet. No chaos. The tool does the matching. The tool does the tracking. You do the pitching. That is the split. That is what we built.

The Companies

PizzaPortal. Online food ordering. Founded 2005. Before most people had smartphones. Before delivery apps were normal. Lech built it in Poland. Raised. Scaled. Sold. The company became one of the largest food delivery platforms in Central Europe. The raise taught him how hard it is to find the right investors when you are pre-product-market fit. When you have traction but no brand. When you are not in London or Berlin. The list problem was real. The spreadsheet was a mess.

iTaxi. Ride-hailing and taxi dispatching. Another build. Another raise. Another spreadsheet. By this point he had a playbook. But the playbook still involved weeks of manual research. Copying fund names. Checking stages. Checking sectors. Losing track. iTaxi grew across multiple markets. The fundraising process did not get easier. It got more familiar. The pain was the same.

SunRoof. Solar roofs and integrated energy. A different sector. Climate tech. Hardware. Longer sales cycles. Different investors. Same fundraising process. Same problem. Who do we contact? Who replied? Who needs a follow-up? Who went cold? The questions do not change. The sector changes. The stage changes. The chaos stays.

Each company taught something. PizzaPortal taught that early-stage lists are hard to build. iTaxi taught that scale does not make the process easier. SunRoof taught that sector expertise in investors matters and that manual filtering is slow. The common thread: no tool was built for this. CRMs were built for sales. Databases were built for research. Nothing was built for the raise. For finding and tracking in one place. That gap is why RaisePilot exists.

Angel in Hell

Lech wrote Angel in Hell after raising for SunRoof. The book is about fundraising from the inside. What it really looks like. What founders do wrong. What investors actually care about. It is not a how-to in the generic sense. It is a reflection on the process. On the psychology. On the mistakes that cost rounds.

Writing the book forced him to articulate what he had learned. What he would do differently. What he would build if he could. RaisePilot came from that. The book is the reflection. RaisePilot is the tool. Same source. Same experience. Different output. One is for reading. One is for using. Both are for founders who are raising and want less chaos.

If you have read Angel in Hell, you will recognize the tone. Direct. No fluff. No false hope. Fundraising is hard. The right tool does not make it easy. It makes it less messy. It reduces the friction. It keeps you from losing threads. That is what we built for.

Brand Values

RaisePilot is built around three values. They are not marketing copy. They are how we work.

Build and ship. We build features that matter. We ship them. We do not wait for perfect. We do not over-plan. We iterate. Matching. Pipeline. Database. Those are the core. We add what founders ask for. We cut what they do not use. The product stays focused. No bloat. No feature creep. We build what helps the raise. We ship it. Then we improve it based on feedback. That is the loop.

No bullshit. We do not oversell. We do not pretend we beat Crunchbase on database size. We do not pretend we beat Visible.vc on investor updates. We are built for one phase: the raise. Finding investors. Tracking the conversation. That is it. Our comparison pages say where we lose. Our pricing page says what you get. No hidden limits. No surprise charges. What you see is what you get. Founder to founder. Honest. Direct.

Founder-first. We price for founders. €9 per month. €299 per year. We do not charge $99 per month. We do not lock you into annual plans for Runway. We want founders to say yes. Not to think about budget. Not to ask for approval. Just to try it. The product should serve founders. Not investors. Not enterprise. Founders raising pre-seed to Series A. That is who we built for. That is who we serve.

The Team

RaisePilot is a small team. We are not a large org. We are not venture-backed (yet). We are builders. We focus on the product. Matching. Pipeline. Database. We do not try to do everything. We do not add investor updates or data rooms or cap table management. We focus on finding investors and tracking the round. That is it. That is enough.

Other tools try to do everything. They become cluttered. They become slow. They add features for every use case. We add features for one use case. Fundraising. The raise. Finding. Tracking. Closing. That focus means a simpler product. A faster product. A product that does not distract you with things you do not need yet. When you are raising, you need matching and pipeline. Nothing else. We give you that.