Article · 8 min read

5 Cold DMs That Led to Funding

Ilir Aliu · 22 Astronauts Free Beginner

Templates in the abstract are cheap; this reproduces the actual cold messages that landed real cheques and dissects why each got a reply. It includes Indian founder Dhruv Ghulati's full cold email to Mark Cuban (which pulled a 500K USD commitment) and Sina Meraji's one-line DM ('building X, raising 70k, 30k committed, interested?'), the clearest proof that an absurdly specific, tiny ask beats a polished paragraph.

  • The one-line ask wins: 'I'm building X, raising 70k, 30k committed, interested?' got a next-day reply where long emails were ignored
  • Ghulati's Cuban email worked because it opened by naming something Cuban had publicly cared about (misinformation) and led with hard proof (30+ AI research papers), not adjectives
  • Open DMs on the 'wrong' channel (Instagram, Twitter) often out-convert a crowded inbox, so go where the investor is actually reading and reachable
Open on 22astronauts.com ↗

The question it answers

  1. How do I write a cold email to a founder or investor I admire that actually gets a reply?

Read with it

  1. Written by a pre-seed investor who reads these emails for a living, so it is the six-part anatomy of a cold email that actually... Sterling Road (Medium) Article · 10 min read How to Cold Email an Investor Ash Rust
  2. The craft of the cold email is universal, but who you send it to and what they expect is not: this maps the actual Indian angel... StartUpMandi Article · 14 min read How to Find Angel Investors in India (2026 Founder Playbook) StartUpMandi editorial team
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