Our startup just raised a $22M Series A, 3 years ago we almost lost it

It was the summer of 2023 and me and my co-founders, Will Monange and Harry Fitzgerald, were holed up in a Spanish villa.

But this was no holiday in the sun: we were inside, with no A/C, sweating buckets and trying to figure out how we were going to save our startup. In the corner of the room was a whiteboard with our names and list of potential investors that we needed to cold call.

Earlier that year we’d realised that we had way less money in the bank than we thought we had. Our growth – which had been unstoppable – slowed and we were forced to make cuts, and the more cuts we made the less we grew. It was a vicious circle.

We’d reached out to our existing investors – to everyone we knew – and had dozens of replies that said the same thing: thanks, but no thanks.

When you run a startup, you hear about this sort of thing happening to founders, but you never expect that it will happen to you. When it does, you can have 100% surety that your startup is a great idea and will one day thrive but you still have that sense of doubt.

You think about all that hard work, all those conversations and all that hustle and a little voice in your head says: was this all for nothing? Is this my fault?

Fanvue was my first company but it wasn’t my first business. At 12, I started gaming on YouTube and by the time I was 16 I was earning £100,000 a year. By the age of 17, I’d moved out and had my own place. During those years I was recording a video every day for my 2.5 million followers. By any metric, I had cracked the creator economy.

And Fanvue was my effort to help others do the same. On YouTube I was dependent on advertising dollars rather than payment directly from my fans. That didn’t make sense to me: why not have a platform that allows people like me to sell content directly to their fans?

This was rattling around my head as I ran my YouTube channel and at 19 I realised that what I really wanted to do was build a billion dollar company, and that Fanvue could be it. But I couldn’t do both, and so I walked away from YouTube and my millions of fans.

And on that day in 2023 when we sat in a Spanish villa trying to rescue our company, I could have reflected that maybe that was a mistake – but I didn’t. Challenges and how you rise to them define you. It was time to show the world that we deserved to survive.

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It finally came down to one call. We managed to get in a room with the CEO of a multi-billion dollar company and pitch an investment round that would give us six months. We had to close him – and we did. In January 2026, we announced a $22.1 million Series A.

I’ve learned a lot of things in that time. First, trust your team. Will and Harry were right there with me fighting to save Fanvue and we achieved it together.

Secondly, don’t worry about your media coverage, your pitch deck, even your valuation – your 100% priority has to be the customer and the product. If it fits, you will thrive.

And finally, I learned that you can’t put out every fire – you have to let some burn. It feels counter-intuitive, but its true: startups and business in general can be a crazy world and you have to prioritise the things you can fix, and put aside those you can’t.