7-Month-Startup Party Round Raises $7 Million From Andreessen Horowitz
- Party Round raised $7 million in fresh funding from the Silicon Valley firm Andreessen Horowitz.
- The startup that allows founders to automate their fundraising met its lead investor with a cold DM.
- Party Round is known for its viral marketing stunts like turning top Silicon Valley VCs into NFTs.
Party Round, the seven-month-old startup that allows founders to automate their fundraising process, just used its own fundraising tool to raise $7 million from an investor it once turned into a cartoon NFT.
The round was led by the general partner Anish Acharya of the venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, also known as a16z. Andreessen Horowitz’s Cultural Leadership Fund, Alexis Ohanian’s Seven Seven Six, as well as Abstract Ventures and Shrug Capital also participated.
The startup is known for its clever marketing stunts such as “Burn the Runway,” a video game that lets users bankrupt top unicorn companies, and Startup Ipsum, a web app that generates believable tech news stories.
In July, Party Round went viral after launching a series of CryptoPunk-style non-fungible tokens made from cartoons of top venture capitalists like Sequoia’s Alfred Lin and Initialized Capital’s Garry Tan. It called the project “Helpful VCs.” Acharya and other partners from a16z were also turned into NFTs.
Party Round
Acharya said those stunts got his attention. He met the founders online by sliding into their direct messages after one of the first marketing stunts — what the company refers to as “drops.”
“Like all great love stories, it started with a cold DM,” Acharya told Insider. “They had a really clear brand voice and a lot of authenticity, and they were doing these really clever drops.”
After the “Helpful VCs” NFTs went viral on Twitter in July, Acharya knew he had to meet the team in person. Acharya booked a flight, along with his a16z partners Anne Lee Skates and Sumeet Singh, to meet Party Round’s founders — Jordi Hays and Sarah Chase — in Los Angeles.
Acharya said that as part of his diligence process he liked to spend a full day whiteboarding with founders before writing a check because he believes a good model for an investor is someone you wish you could hire but can’t. At the end of the day, the human connection matters, he said, because life is too short to work with people you don’t want to.
Spending the day together also allows founders to get a taste of what it’s like to work with their investors on a real problem before signing a term sheet. Acharya founded two companies before his career as a VC, selling his first startup to Google and his second to Credit Karma.
“I love to have the working session because even if for some reason we don’t get to an investment, hopefully, you took away something productive for your company from the time we spent together,” he said.
After a long whiteboard session at their home office in West Los Angeles, the a16z team and the founders of Party Round sealed the deal over salads and diet coke at Gjelina, a trendy restaurant in Los Angeles’ Venice neighborhood.
The team at Andreessen Horowitz understands the convergence of fintech, consumer, and culture on a deep and granular level, Hays, the cofounder and CEO of Party Round, told Insider in an email of why he picked the firm for this oversubscribed round over other investors. “They see the world the same way that we do,” he added, “and we knew from our first conversations that we wanted to partner with them.”
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