New format I'm trying.

I sit down with a founder who just closed a round, and we go through the whole thing in detail: preparation, outreach, terms, and everything in between. The idea is to give you access to the real fundraising take from founders who did it.

First up: Stoil Vasilev, co-founder and CEO of Paypercut, who closed a €5M seed this spring.

The round at a glance:

One of the biggest names in European fintech ghosted Stoil for two months.

Turns out it wasn’t ghosting, but during that time they were conducting due diligence on him. I'll come back to that.

First, how the round actually came together.

Two reasons and Stoil is honest about them.

The boring one: they were running low on cash.

The strategic one: Paypercut is applying for a payments license, and the regulator wants proof you can fund the capital requirement and the hires that come with it. Money in the bank is the best proof there could be.

So they kicked off preparation in the first working days of 2026. As Stoil puts it, you don't want to "end up having to take whatever is out there."

On the number - €5M was not random. In the financial model roughly €3M gets them to profitability. They raised €5M to have a little margin for error, because you don't know the timing, you won't hit every target, and once the license is issued the burn would jump by about €1M a year for two years of hiring.

"We don't believe in living and surviving from one round to the next," he told me. Their strategy was to raise enough to reach profitability, then add a buffer on top.

Materials preparation started January 5th - cap table, shareholders agreement, articles of association, data room, product and infrastructure write-ups, founder CVs, pipeline.

Most of the time went into two things: the financial model and the deck.

The deck went through many iterations. Stoil shared a draft with his existing investors, took their feedback, built upon it, then sent it to a few outside investors for a second read. By January 26th, they were live and sending the deck.

One feedback point was very interesting. Paypercut has a big vision, and Stoil built slides for it. His own investors told him it was too much. "That's overwhelming. Remove these slides." So he did - but he kept them as pocket slides. When an investor started digging into where the company was headed in 5-10 years, he'd pull the vision slides up on the spot and walk them through it. An investor cares where the company is in 5 or 10 years far more than in the next 6 months, and they want to see a plan which makes sense.

He actually used two decks. A short version at 18 slides for everyone, and a longer 26-slide version for investors who had extra interest. Nobody ever turned down the long one, but Stoil was strategic about who shared it with.

What was removed from long to short? - the deep product breakdown (payment stack, BNPL stack, UX), the full leadership team (he kept the founding team and advisors), the detailed roadmap, and the financial projections (those projections went to the appendix).

Stoil used Google Drive. 

The structure, folder by folder was the following: legal (articles, shareholders agreement, cap table), the financial model (investors saw only the P&L outputs and assumptions, not the full model), the deck, the management team (every leader's LinkedIn plus a write-up on why the team fits together), market (a long piece on how they build up TAM/SAM/SOM market by market), pipeline (anonymized, with the real names after an NDA), tech and product, and a Q&A folder.

That Q&A folder is a smart one. Stoil noted down every investor question and its answer. This is good in two ways: he never answered the same question twice, and a full Q&A file tells a new investor that others are already ahead of them - this is a little FOMO trigger, which works well.

A small trick worth stealing: he kept one master data room folder, then made a new folder for every investor and copied the whole thing in. That way he always knew exactly who received what.

Everything was warm. Stoil didn't send a single cold email: "If you get to a point where you start chasing investors via cold messages, you're already desperate." 

He used his own relationships and intros from his existing investors, who are well connected across the UK, France, Germany and Italy.

Then the pipeline numbers - he spoke with over 120 investors. He sorted them A/B/C/D, from warm-and-expecting-your-email down to never-heard-of-you, and worked with this list, moving B's and C's up as the A's dropped away.

Most of the 120 said NO. The usual reason for the current state of the market: they looked at the financials and wanted the curve an AI company shows - a million in ARR in three months. The thing is in Fintech the growth currently doesn’t look like that. 

Out of the 120 funds he spoke to, 9 came into the round, alongside the existing backers who followed on. And a curious fact: some investors who passed at pre-seed led this one.

There is a classic playbook - get a lead investor, receive a term sheet, attract follow-on investors with these terms - didn't happen here.

Stoil had an offer from one investor back in November at terms he liked. So instead of looking for a fresh term sheet, he went to the investors already circling around, and to his existing backers, and asked them if they’re still interested in these terms? Enough said yes, he formed the terms into a SAFE and sent it around. That's how the round got priced.

Since it's a SAFE, most of it is standard. The main negotiation point was the valuation cap and the discount for the next round. They pushed harder than expected, but ultimately agreed on terms which both sides are now happy with.

Now, back to that top fintech name that ghosted Stoil.

They'd reached out in February, held an intro call and disappeared. Turns out they spent two months doing diligence on Stoil. They talked to people who'd worked with him. Ran more customer interviews than any other fund, calling companies in Paypercut's own pipeline to check the product was actually good.

By the time they came back, Stoil was already at a closing stage. He had the money but wanted to include that fintech VC. So he made room, took a little extra dilution, and let them into a round that was basically full. And for sure this move would pay out in the future as these guys bring extra credibility to Paypercut.

I asked what the hardest part of the whole raise was. His answer had nothing to do with outreach or terms. It came down to the weight of the responsibility. "You're responsible in front of investors. If you fail, you're failing them. You're not only failing yourself."

On my question what he would do differently if he had to do it all over again, he said he'd lock the terms with his existing investors on day one, so nobody got confused about the conditions later.

And his one piece of advice, which I'm keeping word for word:

Stoil kissed 120. And he jokingly mentions that if he'd quit after the first 3 no's, like plenty of founders do, there'd be no Paypercut today.

That was my first Round Teardown experiment.

How did you find it? If the format's useful, hit reply and tell me. And if there's a part of the process you want the next founder to go deeper on, tell me that too.

Big thanks to Stoil for being this open.

That’s all for this week.

See you again on a Thursday soon.