Founder: Find PMF with <$2.5M
On the Scaling DevTools podcast, Corgea founder Ahmad Sadeddin argued most software startups can find product-market fit with less than $2.5M. He advises a lean team of 3-5 people has a 2-year runway on that amount, enough for most B2B SaaS or dev tools. His motto: "You should surprise people with how few people you are."
Ahmad Sadeddin's own startup, Corgea, closely mirrors his advice, having raised a $2.6 million seed round. The AI-powered cybersecurity firm, which participated in Y Combinator's S23 batch, operates with a lean team of approximately four people. This aligns with Sadeddin's philosophy of maintaining a small footprint to maximize runway. Before founding Corgea, Sadeddin was the founder of Riskopy, a financial risk analytics company. Riskopy was acquired by the spend management platform Coupa in 2017, where Sadeddin then worked on product before starting his new venture. The sub-$2.5M figure is in line with typical seed funding rounds, which averaged around $3.2-$3.5 million in 2024, though there's a wide variance. For developer tools specifically, the market has seen significant investment, with some early-stage Indian AI and dev tool startups raising comparable seed rounds in 2024 and 2025. The lean startup model has produced notable successes in the Indian ecosystem. Companies like the fintech platform Zerodha and the payments processor Razorpay are prominent examples of businesses that implemented lean principles, focusing on customer feedback and iterative product development to find their footing. Discussions within the developer community on forums like Hacker News often champion bootstrapping and capital efficiency. Founders share stories of achieving product-market fit by solving a specific, painful problem for a niche audience first, often generating revenue from day one rather than relying on large venture rounds. The rise of AI is further enabling small teams to be highly productive, a trend seen in recent Indian startups. Founders report that AI tools allow for smaller engineering pods to manage large business lines, achieving significant annual recurring revenue (ARR) per employee and accelerating their path to market with less capital. However, some in the venture community, including at Y Combinator, have begun to question the traditional "validate before you build" lean startup model in the age of AI. The argument is that with AI making development cycles dramatically faster and cheaper, it can be more effective to build and launch quickly to test market acceptance directly, rather than spending extensive time on customer interviews.
