We’re raising a $750k Pre-Seed.

What we’re raising

We’re raising $750,000 to build Cairnul: agentic fundraising compliance for early rounds. Friends and family, angels, pre-seed, seed and Series A, from $10k to $10 million. The SAFEs, the advisor agreements, the consents and authorizations, and the state and federal filings that come with them.

We’re running this raise on Cairnul itself. Cairnul is the Founder in its own Workspace, the round is a 506(c) Round like any other, and when you invest you become a Cairnul Investor: verified accredited, signing a SAFE, tracked on the cap table, with our Form D filed on the same clock. The raise is the product demonstrating itself.

The paperwork is mandatory, and nobody built for it

The moment the first check clears, a first-time Founder becomes a securities issuer: a federal Form D due 15 days after the first sale, a state notice filing in every state their investors live in, and forms with names like 25102(f) that nobody warned them about. None of it was built for them. So they run the round on a Google Doc, a group chat, and a handshake, and it works right up until it doesn’t.

US operating companies filed 16,960 new Reg D offerings in 2025, and the median one came in under $2m: our band, not Wall Street’s. That is the filed floor, and the SEC publishes a caveat on its own data acknowledging the offerings that never filed. An academic review of nearly 40,000 venture rounds found over half filed no Form D at all. It does not stop at the first round either: from a $10k friends-and-family SAFE to a $10m Series A, the same four document classes and the same filings come due, and one Workspace carries the Founder across all of it.

Sized from there: $273B raised in 2025 across those offerings, friends and family through Series A, every one of them owing the filings. $120M a year in subscription revenue at today’s prices across the roughly 60,000 early rounds signed annually: $79m of Workspaces, $35m of 409As, the rest Counsel and Advisors. $20M in recurring revenue at 10,000 funded Workspaces, a 17% share of that wedge.

The rails finally exist. The tool doesn’t.

Three things changed, and all three had to. SAFEs became the default: 93% of US pre-priced rounds in Q4 2025 closed on one, almost all on the YC post-money standard, and the majority of rounds under $4m now close on one too, so the instrument is settled and it reaches well into seed. State filing went electronic: multi-state notice filing runs through NASAA’s depository now, and states like New York moved off paper in 2020, so the compliance layer is finally templatable. AI crossed from answering to doing: a model can watch a raise, read every document, and have the filing drafted before the deadline lands, work that used to start at $400 an hour.

And it’s already pulling. The alpha releases September 2026 and the paid beta follows in October 2026, and we have 20 signed letters of intent before charging a dollar: 10 Founders, who pay the Workspace subscription and are the side that matters most, 6 Investors, and 4 Counsel, who are also a referral channel because each one brings Founders.

Point a Cairnul Agent at the part everyone else leaves to a lawyer

Cairnul is built around agents that do the work, not a chatbot bolted onto a form. Cairnul Agents read a Founder’s documents, pre-fill their Form D and state notice filings, track every deadline, send reminders, route documents for signing, and file the executed copies where they belong. The Founder keeps the one thing the agents never touch: the signature.

The hard part of an early round is the compliance nobody sees coming. That’s the part we automated first.

Everyone else keeps the record. We run the round.

Three things decide whether an early round gets run correctly: a tool that runs the round rather than recording it afterward, the filings that round triggers, and a price the round can carry. Everything a Founder is handed today drops one of them.

The part that is hard to copy is not the SAFE. A cap-table tool can ship a SAFE template in a quarter. What takes years is the verified compliance library the Agents draft from, and the discipline of declining on an entry that is unverified or stale instead of guessing.

Then it compounds. We land at the first round because that is where the pain is sharpest and nobody is competing for it, and the Workspace does not churn when that round closes: the same workflow carries the Founder from a friends-and-family SAFE to a Series A. Every Investor and Advisor they bring becomes a Cairnul account, many of them Founders themselves. Two revenue surfaces, one acquisition mechanic, near-zero cost to acquire.

What the raise buys

This round funds the next 18 months, across three lines. Most of it is talent: nine hires, plus the compliance library that no competitor can copy without doing the same state-by-state work.

Product and engineering

Smarter Cairnul Agents across drafting, filing and reminders, so more of the compliance work runs on its own. More states covered, and electronic filing directly from Cairnul, so a Founder files without leaving the product. The 506(c) verification and offering workflows this raise runs on, hardened for every Founder. Four hires: a technical product manager, a DevOps engineer, a data engineer and a fullstack engineer.

Trust and compliance

SOC 2, so our security posture matches what we ask Founders to trust us with, and a counsel budget to keep the compliance library and every template we support verified against current regulator guidance. The library expands state by state in order of investor density, and it is the part that compounds: every state we add is one no competitor has. One hire, a legal research analyst, plus copyright, IP and contract work.

Marketing and Founder support

Getting Cairnul in front of first-time Founders at the moment their first round starts: scaling the community that is already running, paid acquisition across Founders, Investors, Advisors and Counsel, and the partnerships that bring Founders in at volume, coworking spaces, accelerators, law firms and VC platform teams. Plus hands-on support for the Founders running rounds on Cairnul. Four marketing and sales hires: a sales development representative, a partnership manager, a customer success manager and a content manager.

Who’s building Cairnul

I’m Grady, and I’ve spent the last several years on the founder’s side of exactly this problem. Since 2020 I’ve worked with idea-stage founders up close: first running a development agency that built their products, then a talent agency placing advisors and helping Pre-Seed and Seed startups get off the ground. I kept ending up in the same seat, walking first-time founders through their first raise. Which template to use. What their lawyer actually needed to see. Which filing was due, and when. The advisor equity nobody wrote down.

I ran that process by hand, round after round, and watched where it broke: the missed Form D nobody caught until a later investor’s lawyer found it, the handshake advisor deal that turned into a cap-table fight two years on, the sharp founder who felt like an amateur the moment they asked someone who believed in them for a check.

Cairnul is that process, built into software. It’s the tool I wish I’d had every one of those times.

Six of us are building Cairnul today: two engineers, two marketers, a CFO, and me. Advisors are being added now, a securities lawyer and a VC platform manager, joining on FASTs, the advisor agreement Cairnul is built around.

How investing works

Five steps, run on Cairnul, the same flow every Investor on the platform goes through.

You’ll do all of this as a Cairnul Investor, on the same product you just invested in.

A small table, and it’s filling

A $750,000 round at a $50,000 minimum is at most fifteen seats, and likely fewer. Verified investors are taken in the order they clear, and when the round is full it closes.

The round is open now, live under Rule 506(c) and accepting verified accredited investors on a rolling basis. The paid beta ships October 2026, so you are investing ahead of the catalyst rather than after it, and the target close is December 31, 2026, sooner if the seats fill first.

The backers we’re looking for

We’re honest about being early. So instead of a logo wall we don’t have yet, here’s who we’re hoping hears about this: operators and founders who have run their own first round and remember exactly how it felt; angels and pre-seed funds who back fintech, legal-tech and developer tools, and who write checks before the logos show up; people close to first-time Founders, meaning accelerators, Founder communities, and startup or securities counsel who see this problem every week; and backers who bring more than a check, whether that’s an introduction, a hard question, or a door worth opening.

If you back tools for the people actually building American companies from the first check, we’d like to talk. The offering is open to accredited investors, and every investor goes through verification first.