I almost quit when a competitor raised their Series A. Here's what I learned.
This week’s Midnight Text edition is written by Apurva Luty, founder of Optimly, a Forum Ventures portfolio company. Optimly helps brands understand and improve how AI systems see them. Forum is also one of her customers.
Apurva spent 15 years at Microsoft, Meta, and Discord studying how people make decisions about brands. She left Discord in 2025 to build Optimly full-time, a move she’d describe as equal parts deliberate and accidental. Below, she shares what this first year has felt like building in a crowded space, and the many times she spiralled.
It was the end of August 2025. I was about a month out from deciding to leave Discord and go full-time on Optimly, my AI brand strategy startup. Optimly helps B2B brands understand how AI models like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity are representing them to buyers, and fixes it when they get it wrong. It’s a space with a lot of players and a lot of capital flowing in fast.
I was talking to my husband about applying to the Forum accelerator, which would mean giving notice, and that weekend, a company called Scrunch AI announced their $15M Series A. They were the second company in this space to raise at that level. And I remember being in tears, thinking what am I even doing? There are already two companies that have raised all this money. Who do I think I am, entering this space where all this capital is already flowing?
That question followed me for months. Not just about Scrunch. But about Profound, which had raised $155 million. And about every press release and LinkedIn post that showed up in my feed about someone else solving the same problem.
What I didn’t know at that moment was that the panic was actually useful. It just took me a while to figure out how.
There are two kinds of spiral, and they need different responses
Looking back, there were two distinct things that triggered the feeling, and I think it’s worth addressing both separately.
The first is the funding panic: “They raised $23 million, they have way more backing than I do, I’ll never catch up.” That one is mostly noise. It’s just FOMO. It’s hard to sit with, but it doesn’t actually tell you anything meaningful about your company.
The second is thesis collision. They’re building what I’m building. They’re doing the thing I said was my differentiator. That one is worth paying attention to, because it’s a real market signal.
Scrunch wasn’t just raising money. They were announcing a specific solution: an AI-optimized version of your website, invisible and separate from your regular site, packaged up and sold to brands. And I thought, okay, now there are companies starting to build solutions, not just AI visibility measurements. That was my whole thesis going into the Forum accelerator.
The panic that came from that was valid. It was my brain trying to process real information. The problem was I was processing it like it was a verdict on me, instead of data I could actually use. And honestly, leaning into the analytical side of my brain is what kept me moving forward. I’m a researcher by training. Taking a step back and treating the panic as data felt more natural to me than sitting in it.
What worked, in retrospect
Here are four things I’ve figured out over six months of building in a crowded space, going through fundraising, and coming out the other side with a term sheet. These aren’t lessons I planned in advance. They’re what actually helped.
1. Don’t compete on their terms. Try to think ahead.
When Profound was doing monitoring, I focused on fixes, because that’s what I was hearing in customer conversations. When the SaaS market started to feel uncertain, I moved toward building out a directory. Now we’re also becoming data infrastructure for agentic commerce. It’s like playing chess. You see what your opponent is doing, but instead of just reacting, you try to think a couple moves ahead and go there.
In a space changing this fast, nobody really has a durable edge yet. Even the smartest AI researchers don’t fully understand how these models work. Anthropic and OpenAI will tell you that themselves. You can have $155 million and still not know exactly what you’re throwing it at. Being small and able to pivot quickly is a real advantage right now.
2. Use the competition to sharpen your positioning, not as fuel for a spiral.
When Scrunch announced their website-builder solution, my instinct was to panic. My second instinct was to bring it into my next customer discovery call and ask: have you seen what Scrunch is building? What do you think of it?
That is the best market research you can do. Competitors’ marketing tells you what they think matters. Your customers tell you what’s actually true. And those are often very different things.
When I started using competition as a way to get sharper, everything changed. I could confidently focus on building for the people who would actually pay me.
3. Talk to more customers.
Kevin Corliss, my Managing Director at Forum, kept asking me one question: how many customers are you talking to? Every time I’d spiral, that was his redirect.
He was right. The more I read TechCrunch and LinkedIn, the more panicked I became. The more I talked to real people who were struggling with the exact problem I was solving, the more motivated I became. Those were the conversations that fed my conviction to keep going.
If people are still struggling with this, the market clearly doesn’t have solutions yet. That’s not a threat. That’s the whole point.
4. Figure out what you’d do if no VC ever wrote you a check.
This felt like giving up before I did it. It wasn’t.
Going into fundraising, Kevin pushed me to actually sit with a question: if no one writes you a check, what will you do? Do you still believe this is worth solving?
I had to answer that honestly. Yes, I have conviction that this is real. And if VC funding doesn’t come, there are other sources of capital and other ways to keep building. Once I’d worked that out, I stopped pitching from desperation and started pitching from conviction. Investors feel that difference immediately.
We had 80 first conversations before we got a term sheet. More than half the time, we didn’t move forward because investors said the space was too crowded, too noisy, and too much capital was already flowing. Which validated every fear I’d had.
And we still got the term sheet. And we’re still here. And I feel more confident than ever. Although, I’m sure there will still be many moments of panic, albeit, less with time.
The thing about noisy spaces
Here’s what I’ve come to believe: all that competitor noise that made me question myself in August actually sharpened my positioning, clarified my thesis, and forced me to talk to more customers than I would have otherwise.
Nobody actually has a real edge in my space right now. Not Profound with $155 million. Not Scrunch. Not me.
The company that wins is going to be the one that figures out the process for unraveling the mystery, and stays close enough to their customers to know if they’re actually solving the right part of it. No one has all the answers yet. And in many ways, being small and able to try different things is an advantage that some of the more well-funded companies don’t have right now.
Competition didn’t threaten my company. It made me a better founder.
If you’re building in a crowded space, and are feeling what I was feeling, I won’t tell you it goes away. But it becomes useful. As long as you don’t let that fear of competition paralyze you.
And if you’re a founder or b2b marketer trying to navigate AI without losing your mind, subscribe to my newsletter Signal/Noise .
Good luck!
Apurva
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from what we track, founders who fundraise from conviction (not desperation) close rounds 40% faster and at better terms. you figured this out on year one.
Interesting