Dan Kariuki
951 posts
“So you bootstrapped the whole company?”
“Yeah, I turned it down. Turned down the funding.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah, I turned it down just to do this, just to grind it out, build it myself.”
“So you had an opportunity to take venture money?”
“Yeah, a term sheet and everything.”
“From who?”
“Yeah, a big fund out in Menlo Park. It was a top-tier firm, though. And they offered me like 15, some shit like 10 billion or something like that, 5 billion, something like that.”
“Wait, wait, wait. A term sheet.”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, but not 5 billion dollars. They offered you 5 billion dollars for your seed round?”
“Yeah.”
“For a seed round?”
“Yeah.”
“What are we doing here?”
“Like, what the y’all, like, you know what I’m saying?”
“That’s more than the GDP of a small country.”
“But I was so younger, like, I didn’t know what a cap table was.”
“Are you sure they offered you 5 billion dollars?”
“I turned it down.”
“You didn’t even have a product.”
“It was a SAFE, like, I had to give up equity for this decade.”
“But you would get $5 billion?”
“Yeah.”
“You’d be one of the most valuable companies on earth.”
“It was somewhere, it was in the billions, though.”
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@foundrceo @ dropnc.com is an enabler for persons who maintain global economic relationships, especially in EME regions or otherwise: to initiate and transfer capital across regions natively.in their local currency: with an ease & intuitiveness of a tier 1 currency.
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Founder connection thread 👇
I’m looking to connect with more people building in SaaS, tech, AI tools, product development, and dev tools.
Drop what you’re working on below. I’ll check out as many as I can and provide feedback.
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Three new companies backed today in the MENA region.
At LvlUp Ventures, we back founders building the infrastructure that helps people, businesses, and industries operate more intelligently at scale.
Today, we're excited to announce new startups in our ecosystem across relationship infrastructure, travel AI, and biotech intelligence, all based in MENA:
→ Traveln.ai is building the AI orchestration layer for global travel, enabling airlines, tourism boards, OTAs, and travel platforms to deliver fully personalized, bookable travel experiences powered by agentic AI. Already signed 8 commercial deals, built a pipeline of 24+ active opportunities, established partnerships across airlines, tourism authorities, and travel platforms, and is targeting a $100B AI-ready travel market.
→ COGENT3 is applying emergent AI to molecular discovery, helping pharmaceutical companies identify promising drug candidates without the massive costs of traditional screening campaigns. The platform is already in discussions with organizations including Amgen, Gilead, Vertex, Dr. Reddy’s, and Genentech, targeting $100K–$300K paid pharma pilots while addressing an industry that spends $12B+ annually on high-throughput screening.
→ MAXION is rethinking the relationship economy, building infrastructure that supports the full relationship lifecycle—from singles to couples to communities. Already operating with a 96% success rate from its offline matchmaking business, featured in 350+ global publications, licensed under the ADGM regulatory framework, with 32,000+ waitlist applications and 5,200+ approved members in Dubai alone.
Collectively, these companies are tackling critical challenges across some of the world's largest markets:
• Building infrastructure for meaningful human relationships
• Transforming travel through AI-powered personalization
• Accelerating pharmaceutical discovery with emergent AI
We're proud to partner with MAXION, Traveln.ai, and COGENT3 as they continue building from the MENA region to global markets.
#LvlUpVentures #MENA #VentureCapital #AI #TravelTech #BioTech #HealthTech #ConsumerTech #Startups
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Dear African Founder, what are you building?
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It’s a real epic adventure! British travelers Robbie, Josh, Jasper, and Ivo (Tuk South project) bought two tuk-tuks in Kenya 🇰🇪 about five years ago and drove them all the way to Colombia 🇨🇴.
They headed south through Tanzania and across Africa, shipped the tuk-tuks across the Atlantic, then continued through South America.
The 10,000+ km journey faced rough roads, borders, deserts like Chile’s Atacama, wildlife, and breakdowns — while raising awareness and funds for Kenyan conservation (e.g., Big Life Foundation — @biglifeafrica.)
Follow their mods, challenges, and stories on Instagram (@tuksouth), TikTok, and YouTube. An impressive feat turning basic Kenyan taxis into global explorers. 🛺🌍
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Drop what you are currently building below.
Does not matter how early it is. Does not matter if it is finished.
If you are working on something right now
A project, a side thing, a tool, a smart contract, a design system.
Anything counts.
Every single one gets looked at.
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@Akintola_steve Hey Steve , if you get sometime , I’d appreciate you looking @ dropnc.com . 🙏
It’s a socio-financial platform.
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Dan Kariuki ретвитнул
If you’re building a wallet system and your source of truth is a balance column,
May the database gods be with you 😂
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@kbulychev_ We are a ‘sociable’ neobank, @ dropnc.com , literally . 😂. It’s a digital community bank.
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Neobanks guys:
What’s your product’s unique feature no other (or almost no other) project has?
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Let's get our first paying user together !
Nerva biometric is live and put in use !
I need acquisition and conversion now ! twitter.com/i/broadcasts/1…
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1 of the biggest clues about what we are building at dropnc.com is hidden behind a simple hover on the "Get Started" button.
That's the entire thesis.
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My apple tree that I planted like 6 years ago is starting to bear fruit!
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You can just do things
Like manually set the bytes being sent to a receipt printer
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i asked one of our researchers to explain his loss function and he took out goodfellow, bengio and courville 2016. chat are we “cooked”
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I once pitched on zoom and the partner spent the whole pitch throwing peanuts into the air and catching them in his mouth and crunching them.
It was weird 😅
GREG ISENBERG@gregisenberg
I was once pitching in a board room at a top 3 VC firm for a $15M Series A. 12 people in the meeting. One of the GPs fully fell asleep. Out cold for 30+ minutes. Nobody acknowledged it. Everyone just kept going. I kept presenting my Series A slides to an unconscious man in a Herman Miller chair and somehow that was considered normal. That's venture capital. You might fly across the country to perform for people who may or may not be conscious. It's a dance. And sometimes you lead and sometimes you follow and sometimes your partner is unconscious. If you're raising right now, just know: every founder has a story like this. The process is weird. The power dynamic is weird. You're not crazy for thinking it's weird. No one talks about it because they want to continue raising. But I'm happy to stick my neck out there. It is weird.
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What a journey it has been!
The MARIA_DB guy did not give me a job btw 😂
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If you get rejected by an early stage VC
It's not business, it's just personal
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Dan Kariuki ретвитнул
People always ask how long it takes before community building actually converts to customers.
For us, it was 6 months from when we started pushing into the market to when inbound started coming back.
If you think week one or even four is going to produce results, you're going to be disappointed and quit before it compounds.
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