720 / SevenTwenty (deployed under the company Airhelmet in the early stages) was founded in 2012 in Italy with the aim to research and develop a novel and innovative bicycle helmet (and in the future also skiing helmet) with a new internal absorption core made of a honeycomb structure in elastomers which outperforms the traditional polystyrene core.
720 / SevenTwenty had 2 main problems, one being that the founding team didn’t have any entrepreneurial finance experience and therefore didn’t know how to build a super early growth and investment case.
Also they never raised venture funding in the past in their entrepreneurial experience.
We worked with the founding team of 720 / SevenTwenty to go through all the important elements of the 0-Series project, from finding first project and distribution partners, through building a provable and repeatable growth plan, to running the whole end-to-end seed fundraising including the preparation and execution work.
“ Without Fast Forward Advisors we would’ve not been able to find the project partners and raise the needed seed funding. We would certainly not be here today and thriving “
“ Without Fast Forward Advisors we would’ve not been able to find the project partners and raise the needed seed funding. We would certainly not be here today and thriving “
720 / SevenTwenty (deployed under the company Airhelmet in the early stages) was founded in 2012 in Italy with the aim to research and develop a novel and innovative bicycle helmet (and in the future also skiing helmet) with a new internal absorption core made of a honeycomb structure in elastomers which outperforms the traditional polystyrene core. In the first product certification tests the core outperformed on average the competitors’ cores by 50%.
With this innovation in hand 720 wanted to develop a business and raise a first round of funding to develop the first series of the helmets and produce the needed tests to get commercialization approvals.
Fast Forward Advisors was appointed to help 720 in developing a seed fundraising strategy based on the innovation and validations that 720 had so far.
The main problems of SevenTwenty when we started our collaboration were the following:
1. Business and Investment Case for 0-Series
720 had a very strong commercial and technical team behind the innovation, but struggling in defining some elements of their business and investment case. As first time entrepreneurs knowing exactly which steps to undertake, in order to kickoff a project in the best way possible, is not trivial, especially if going down a venture-backed path
2. Seed Fundraising
Since SevenTwenty never raised external funding in the past, they didn’t have both network or know-how on the process.
We worked with 720 on all the challenges and provided the following solutions:
1. Business and Investment Case for 0-Series
We worked with the founding team via our IR & Fundraising Consulting to go through all the important elements of the 0-Series project, from a provable and repeatable growth plan, through finding first project and distribution partners, to financial projections and a first funding plan. All the elements in the Business Plan, including required assets, investment needs and first validations were included, in order to have a rock-solid business and investment case and a minimum viable budget could be created.
2. End-to-end Seed Fundraising
We worked with 720 via our FundRaising Booster (FRB) to raise their first (informal) venture round, which they wanted to raise from business angels with industry network and connections. Since we did the work with them on the business and investment case before, we skipped the preparation phases of our FRB service and jumped right into the “fundraising operations” phase.
In that phase we:
a) Created a long-list of potentially fitting investors by crawling through our internal databases (with past transactions), investors via 2nd rank introductions and our own specific investor research
b) Reached out and short-listed interested investors (and managed feedback loops and arrangement of 1-1 meetings)
c) Supported in deal closing and negotiations
Our Impact
We successfully got in touch with 50+ investor shortlist active in the 720’s industry and segment and based in Europe and shortlisted 3-4 investors and finally closed high 6-figure deals with an northern italian seed fund and with a superangel from the DACH region active in consumer alpine products.
