RaiseiP

If it’s time to raise the investment you need to take the next step, it’s time to RaiseiP

If your business is ready to take the next step and cement your position as the market-leading innovators you are, you will almost certainly need more substantial funding.

However, a greater level of investment demands a greater depth of detail.

While it is certainly not easy to raise your first round of funding, successfully navigating the subsequent rounds is significantly tougher.

This is the point where things get serious for investors.

A good idea is no longer enough to sustain their interest; investors want to see you have the strategy, resources, processes and - of course - intellectual property (IP) protection to achieve the level of linear growth that will deliver the financial return they want.

This means the due diligence they perform will be much more sophisticated than you have experienced before. They’ll be scarily thorough in the way they examine every aspect of your plans, pulling everything apart to try and find any potential holes.

Should they find these holes, their confidence will be damaged which could be enough to make them walk away before you can raise the capital you need to take the next step.

This means that before you expose yourself to that increased level of scrutiny, you need to be sure everything is not only in the right place but also delivered and articulated in the right way.

You need to provide the most comprehensive and compelling case to your potential investors and present it openly, clearly and professionally.

This is where RaiseiP will help.

IF YOU ARE PLANNING TO TAKE THE NEXT STEP, WHY SHOULD YOU CHOOSE TO Raise(your)iP?

In short RaiseiP will make your business more attractive to potential investors and fully prepared for the intense scrutiny your potential investors’ due diligence will put you under.

RaiseiP will help you pull together all the details an investor needs to make a positive decision.

More importantly we will make sure you present all this information in a highly professional and persuasive way with the help of an experienced attorney who has worked alongside investors and start-ups for many years.

However, RaiseiP provides much more. We will also provide you with everything you will need to convince an investor that:

You have protected all the IP required to deliver your business plan
Your IP maps exactly to your commercial products/processes
The ownership of any existing and future IP is clear
You are fully aware of any potential FTO considerations that need to be addressed
When it comes to selling the business, your IP will increase the valuation of your company rather than put it at risk
There are no outstanding IP-related issues that could prevent their investment from realising the return it should
All the information they’ll need to make an informed investment decision will be delivered to their data room for easy and instant access

All of this will be covered in a concise report that sets out what you will need to do next in clear, easy to follow steps.

We also deliver three additional benefits we feel are unique to Potter Clarkson:

We can host a detailed IP debriefing for you and your team to talk you through our recommendations and share some broader perspectives that we’ve learned whilst helping other businesses in similar situations successfully navigate this crucial next funding stage.
If your innovation involves a crossover of technologies (for example the use of AI in healthcare or pharma), we will assemble a multi-disciplinary team of attorneys from across our technical departments. They will work closely together in a team led by an experienced lead attorney who’ll be chosen depending on the main technological focus of your innovation and your sector.
If your pitch needs broader legal support, we can refer you internally to our experienced team of IP solicitors at Potter Clarkson. They will ensure you have all the commercial agreements you’ll need for commercial, licensing or collaborative purposes. Having these in place will give your pitch an even greater depth and prove to a potential investor that you already have all bases covered.

HOW DOES RaiseiP WORK?

Raising finance requires more than good ideas and good intentions. You need to show you’re ready to raise your operation, your revenue and your profitability to the next level.

This will involve every area of your business from your strategy and the business plan that sits beneath it to your products, processes, people and planned progression and, of course, the IP rights required to protect all these elements.

However - more practically and more immediately - you will need to raise additional investment and as you move up the ladder, you will encounter increasingly sophisticated investors who will do increasingly sophisticated due diligence.

With more significant returns on offer, they will adopt a genuinely painstaking approach, diving deeper into every detail than they will have in previous investment rounds. You will need to answer their questions and alleviate any lingering doubts.

This is exactly what RaiseiP has been created to do.

RaiseiP will make sure you are absolutely ready to raise the additional finance you need to scale up and take your business to the next level.

We don’t do this by examining the relevant paperwork from a distance; we do this by spending time with you and working through every detail of your business so that together we can build the compelling argument you’ll need to convince an investor that you are ready to scale up.

We then help you structure the supporting evidence so that is it easy to find, easy to follow and easy to access.

Although every audit is slightly different, the key points we always address include:

Making sure your IP portfolio fully supports your pitch, your strategy and your future growth
Finding the best way to showcase everything your investors need to see in the most professional and easily accessible format (including helping you to create an internal data room)
Uncovering any skeletons that may be hidden in your closet and work out how best to fix them
Vigorously stress testing both your strategy and your pitch so you are totally confident when you get in front of your potential investors
Mapping your sales strategy to your filing strategy, even if that means refreshing your current commercial agreements
Realigning and refocusing you if you have, as so often happens, veered off your original course
Finalising the strategy that will support the growth you’re promising
Setting out the best way to implement your growth plan once you receive your investment including working out how you’ll work with third parties so that your IP strategy isn’t impacted

And, to make sure we cover absolutely everything we will use the mind maps we’ve designed over the years specifically for this purpose.

Once we have a complete picture, we’ll summarise and present our findings to give you an honest appraisal of your IP. We’ll also list out our recommendations as to what you still need to do so that you have the IP rights and IP strategy in place to raise the finance you need.