THEO Growth is a startup that helps companies maximize their AI usage by refining their unique business context into an “AI-ready” format. We spoke to the founder and CEO Guntis Coders about the €430 000 pre-seed funding THEO Growth recently secured from Bad Ideas Fund, FIRSTPICK, and theIntelligent VC.
Fact sheet:
Company founded in: September 1, 2023
Latest funding round: €430 000 in February 2025
Funding process duration: 3-4 months
Funding round stage: pre-seed
Investors: Bad Ideas Fund (lead), FIRSTPICK, theIntelligent VC
From Google Sheets to MVP
For the first ten months, THEO Growth operated as a bootstrapped venture, but after a pivot in July 2024, the founders recognized that this model was no longer sustainable. Guntis explains: “We had built our core tool and prompts using Google Sheets – the product wasn’t yet in production, but it worked. We clearly knew what had to be built, but we needed speed and developers, and a CTO.”
This led to an angel investment round of €74,000 from Artis Kehris, Krišs Pujāts, and Andrei Doktoroff (theIntelligent VC). This capital was crucial for launching their Minimum Viable Product (MVP), which they accomplished in roughly two and a half months, by November 11, 2024. At this point, THEO Growth platform was pre-revenue, but it already had around 600 signed-up free plan users.
The successful MVP launch created momentum for a pre-seed funding round. Having already engaged with several VCs who were awaiting the MVP’s release, THEO Growth experienced a successful launch on Product Hunt. They received their first term sheet in December and officially closed the round in February. Other investors in this round were FIRSTPICK from Lithuania and the Latvian theIntelligent VC, who also participated in the previous angel round.
Optimizing AI through context engineering
THEO Growth specializes in helping companies maximize the value they get from artificial intelligence. At the core of their approach is context engineering, a crucial concept that has recently gained widespread recognition. THEO Growth gathers and processes a company’s information from various sources, including websites and documents, using a proprietary methodology. This process results in a clear, AI-optimized digital representation that serves as the ideal context for AI models. The company’s expertise ensures that AI systems receive “just enough” context – not too little, not too much – leading to more precise and effective AI outcomes.
THEO Growth is about to launch its updated solution on Product Hunt on July 24. The latest version will address the challenge of keeping the context knowledge base up to date by automatically and accurately integrating company updates into the existing knowledge base. This ensures that the AI always operates with the most current and relevant information. Guntis explains his vision:
“Our goal is that every company would be able to get much more out of AI, much faster, and consistently high-quality results across tools and team members. Because they will be able to focus on the prompt-task definition, and we will provide the right business context at the right moment.”
THEO Growth strategically targets small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), with a particular focus on marketers, consultants, and marketing agencies. This niche differentiates them from larger AI providers like OpenAI, whose solutions often cater to either a broad mainstream audience or large enterprises requiring more generic, universal applications. THEO Growth positions itself to offer high-quality AI optimization that is less complex, expensive, and difficult to implement than enterprise-level solutions.
In agreement with its investors, THEO Growth initially focused on technical development and refining and scaling its unique AI optimization approach. Recently, the company has also started promotion and marketing. The company is now strategically balancing its investment between continued technological developments and building user awareness and a user base.
Biggest fundraising challenges
For THEO Growth, networking proved to be a critical factor in securing investment. Guntis leveraged pre-existing relationships with some investors who showed trust in him and his vision, even without fully understanding the technical specifics of the product he was building. Conversely, investor Andrej Doktoroff, who was not previously acquainted with Guntis, immediately understood what THEO Growth was about and was ready to back it.
Guntis noted a strong synergy with the remaining investors in the pre-seed round, attributing it to their backgrounds as founders and their approach to evaluating the business. Rather than fixating on financial projections, they prioritized understanding the “why, how, and for whom” THEO Growth was building its solution, alongside their validation strategies.
As opposed to the popular assumption that you need to engage with tens or hundreds of investors, Guntis spoke with only six before the product’s official launch. This was a deliberate choice, as the team prioritized building the product over extensive fundraising conversations. Guntis explains:
“Then I said – okay, I’m going to build it, instead of just talking about it. When the MVP was ready, we did the follow-ups. And then we just clicked – investors really understood, and they believed in us as the founders.”
A decisive moment in securing the investment was THEO Growth’s pitch at TechChill’s Fifty Founders Battle. Guntis’ presentation on stage served as a final push for investors to make their decision.
When it comes to fundraising challenges, Guntis admits that navigating complex legal processes, including data rooms and agreements, was more challenging than he had expected. The company’s existing cap table, which included three angel investors and three co-founders, became more intricate with the addition of two new VCs.
How to sell the vision
Demonstrating your expertise and being convincing is critical when talking to investors. Guntis tells us: “I sold my vision by explaining how AI has evolved until now, and how I see it’s going to evolve further on. I explained that this is the right moment for our product because of the capabilities of AI, the costs of AI, and other important details.”
“Our solution wasn’t just about catching the trend, it came from our personal experience. We recognized that even as advanced prompt engineers, we found managing AI context super difficult. Imagine how hard it would be for regular users. So we decided to build a tool for both ourselves and the broader market,” Guntis elaborates.
The team’s deep expertise further strengthened their case. Guntis, with over a decade of experience in startups and academia, demonstrated a strong grasp of systems, methodologies, and the technical aspects of AI. Meanwhile, their CTO Edgars Skore brought extensive experience in building AI-enabled projects for enterprises – over 60, in fact.
Guntis believes that venture capital is not for everyone, and for a regular B2B startup it shouldn’t always be the chosen path. However, he emphasizes the importance of fast development when building a product in the AI realm: “In our case, the speed was super crucial. Nothing else mattered, just the speed. In other circumstances, we could have built the tool, started selling it, and would have money flowing in. With the investment, we basically bought the speed.”
Full speed ahead, THEO Growth has reached another important milestone, its streamlined context refinement upgrade, targeted at advanced AI users and launching on Product Hunt this week (July 24).
Guntis’ advice to other founders is this: focus on your customers and get validation that they have a problem that you can solve. If you stay focused on value creation, many other issues will become insignificant, for your company and also for investors.
Sourse: https://labsoflatvia.com/en/news/how-i-raised-theo-growth-shares-its-journey-to-e430k-pre-seed-funding