Bootstrapped to €1M MRR. Oversubscribed in two weeks. Then everything changed

Heizma just turned two. The scorecard reads like a contradiction: subsidy crash, staff cuts, and revenue tripled anyway. Michael Kowatschew called it the hardest time of his entrepreneurial life.

Most founders would stop there. Kowatschew instead explained exactly how a company can lose its core market overnight, cut 30% of its headcount four months after raising, acquire a competitor out of insolvency, and still triple revenue in year two.

That combination - a fundraise playbook AND the post-raise reality check - is what makes this story worth telling. You get the process behind a €2.5M oversubscribed angel round AND you see what happened when the plan met the market.

The founder and the company

Heizma was founded in March 2024 by three co-founders with prior startup operating experience that matters for understanding the raise:

Michael Kowatschew - former president of Sigma Squared Society (the global student founders’ network), Sequoia Scout. His network is disproportionate to his age.

Alexander Valtingojer - former co-founder and CEO of Coinpanion, acquired. He’d already built and exited.

Valentin Perkonigg - CEO of Brickwise, Forbes 30 Under 30. Running a company while co-founding another.

The company installs heat pumps and solar systems for Austrian households, handling the full chain from sales through to its own field installation teams. The sector they entered was almost entirely analogue: Word files, manual price calculations with a desktop calculator, and local-hosted server rooms in installation companies that needed a VPN to function.

They could have raised immediately on team pedigree. They didn’t.

The bootstrap phase - and the 58-cent story

By the time they opened to investors, roughly twelve months after founding, Heizma had:

• €10M+ in order volume in year one

• 500 heat pumps sold

• ~€1M monthly revenue (year one total: over €3.5M)

• 70 employees, including own installation subsidiaries across Austrian provinces

• 500+ customer inquiries per week, growing week-on-week

All of this on their own money.

Kowatschew explained the decision directly in a September 2024 interview: “Can we build something that truly scales AND is sustainable for many years to come? We said: let’s try it ourselves first.”

The practical price of that decision showed up one Monday. End of the month. Co-founder Valentin Perkonigg dropped a message in the founding team’s Slack: it might get a bit tight.

Kowatschew opened the bank account and screenshotted what he found.

58 cents.

€50,000 in bills due Friday. €80,000 in receivables that hadn’t arrived yet.

They didn’t open a bridge round. They didn’t call an emergency investor meeting. They went from monthly to daily cashflow planning - and made it through.

That story, told casually at an industry event seven months before the raise, became the single most powerful moment in the fundraise. Not a slide. Not a metric. A screenshot of 58 cents and the fact that the company didn’t blink.

The rise

When Heizma opened to investors in early 2025, the dynamics were inverted. With €1M MRR and 70 employees, they weren’t selling a promise. They were offering allocation in a machine that was already running.

The process:

Kowatschew mapped his syndicate through two networks: Sigma Squared (the founder society he previously led) and the Sequoia Scout network he had access to. He pre-validated roughly 150% of his target in soft commits before formally opening the round. The target was €2M. He entered with enough demand to know it would close.

The round ran for approximately 14 days. It closed at €2.5M - oversubscribed from the €2M target - from a syndicate of twelve named operator angels.

The investor list, by background:

• Bernhard Niesner - Busuu (language learning, unicorn exit)

• Felix Porsche - FAP Beteiligungen (family office)

• Ignaz Forstmeier - ex-Personio (HR SaaS, €8B+ valuation)

• Laura Warnier - ex-GoStudent (EdTech, unicorn)

• Hanno Lippitsch - Eversports (B2C marketplace)

• Henrik Piroth - heycater! (B2B events)

• Karl Josef Seilern - Angel Invest (professional angel syndicate)

• Christopher Zemina - Future Fund & Pliant (fintech)

• Daniel Dippold - EWOR (founder fellowship)

• Fiona Macintyre - Forming Impact (impact investing)

• Sebastian Becker - Redalpine (Swiss VC)

• Vital Laptenok - Flyer One Ventures (Ukrainian VC)

No traditional VC board seat. No lead institutional investor with control rights.

On top of the €2.5M equity, Heizma stacked approximately €3M in Austrian grants and debt facilities (FFG / AWS / ERP-style programs), bringing total available capital to over €5M - for roughly 12-13% dilution on the equity portion.

Kowatschew’s philosophy on raising: “I would never raise just to raise.”

Then the market collapsed

Here’s where the Heizma story stops being a clean fundraise case study and starts being something more useful.

In early 2025, the new Austrian government took office with a clear austerity course. Public subsidies for heat pumps were eliminated. The market dropped 85 percent.

It was a shock the founders hadn’t anticipated.

Their response was not to hunker down. It was to move.

January 2025: Heizma launched a photovoltaic (solar) business line from scratch. By March, they’d hit €1M in PV sales alone.

Early 2025: They acquired meo Energy, an insolvent Graz-based energy management startup, to position Heizma as a full-service home electrification provider - not just heat pumps.

The pivot in Kowatschew’s own framing: “We are the single point of contact for everything around your energy when you own a house.”

The initial reaction to the market crash had been honest: “First we thought, we sell heat pumps, it can’t be too hard.” Then the reality: “It was very hard.”

The post-raise reality check

Four months after closing €2.5M, Heizma cut 30% of its headcount.

The primary driver: the SDR function - outbound sales development and customer qualification - had been automated by AI faster than anyone at the company had planned for when building that team post-raise. A function they’d hired humans for in Q2 became software by Q3.

Kowatschew was direct: “We continue to hire every month - just in different, more relevant positions.”

The company also consolidated its decentralized GmbH structure - four regional subsidiaries - into a single national entity: Heizma Installations GmbH.

The result of all of this - the pivot, the acquisition, the cuts, the restructuring?

Revenue tripled. From over €3.5M in year one to over €10M in year two. In a market that dropped 85%.

What comes next

2026 target: over €20 million in revenue.

Heizma has signed a strategic partnership with Viessmann to electrify 1,000+ houses this year. The bigger play: a subscription model Kowatschew calls “electrification as a subscription.” Replace your gas and electricity bill with a monthly package that bundles heat pump, PV system, and a dynamic electricity tariff. Save from day one.

That’s the shift from one-time installation revenue to recurring. If it works, it changes the fundraise story for whatever comes next.

When asked whether he’d still be at Heizma in two years: “Definitely.”

His closing philosophy, the one he keeps coming back to at the two-year mark: “In the best of times, the worst companies are built. In the worst of times, the best.”

The playbook - five moves

1. Bootstrap until the traction speaks. Heizma ran on its own money for 12+ months, reaching €1M MRR and 70 employees before taking a single external euro. When they finally raised, investors weren’t evaluating whether the model works. They were deciding whether they’d get allocation. If you can survive the cashflow pressure of bootstrapping to undeniable traction, your entire negotiating position changes. Don’t raise to prove the model. Raise to accelerate something already proven.

2. Let your hardest moment become your pitch. The 58-cent story wasn’t in a deck. It was told at an event, casually. And it did something no metric can do: it proved the founders could manage a company through genuine stress without reaching for external capital in a panic. If you’ve survived a real cashflow crisis and your business held, that story belongs at the front of your fundraise, not buried in a footnote. Operator angels evaluate founders on capital discipline under pressure, not on slide aesthetics.

3. Build a syndicate of operators, not a lead VC. Twelve named angels, each from a recognized European scale-up, plus two small funds. No institutional lead with a board seat or control rights. For a first round under €5M, a curated operator syndicate beats the standard “find a lead VC” approach on expertise, distribution, signal, and control. Map your syndicate by operational expertise gap, not by fund size.

4. Stack non-dilutive capital on top of equity. €2.5M equity + ~€3M Austrian grants and debt = €5M+ deployed, for roughly 12-13% dilution. Research which grant and loan programs become accessible once you have professional investors on your cap table. In Austria and Germany specifically, FFG, AWS, and ERP programs have thresholds tied to co-investment. Model your equity raise as the unlocking mechanism for non-dilutive capital, not as the full solution.

5. Raise for the business you’ll run in 12 months, not the one you run today. Heizma built a human SDR team post-raise. Four months later, AI automated the function and 30% of headcount was cut. Before funding any function with your raise capital, ask: will this still be a human-led function in 12 months? The gap between “rational hire” and “automated away” is compressing to quarters, not years. Meanwhile, an 85% market crash forced a pivot from heat pumps to full-service electrification. The €2.5M wasn’t spent where the founders originally planned. It was spent where the market demanded. Build contingency into your deployment plan.

This article is also published on Substack. illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Sustainability & Energy writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.

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