I do Reiki. 

No, I don’t usually lead with that in meetings - but I wanted to share it with you because it's the only thing that's ever made my brain actually shut up for an hour.

If you've never tried it - or written it off as something people do while burning incense and listening to whale music - hear me out. 

Reiki is the practice of channeling universal life force energy. It left me feeling like someone pressed a reset button.

I went in sceptical. I haven't stopped going since.

The reason it works - for me, anyway - is that for one hour, nothing else exists. No phone, no emails, no background hum of everything you still need to sort.

I'd forgotten what that felt like. Some people have it considerably harder than me to get there. Reiki probably isn't going to solve everyone's problems, but I do know something that might - and it's exactly what I'm unpacking in this week's capital raise.

Mental load: real, relentless and apparently very fundable.

1/ Wecasa is a French platform letting you book cleaners, beauticians, massage therapists and childcare in minutes - and just raised €18M from three competing investors

2/ In a fundraising climate obsessed with AI, Wecasa raised €18M by sending real people to real homes to do real things

3/ Profitable, growing at 60% year on year and not a single layoff since 2016 - by the time they raised, it was clear to investors the model was working

4/ The key lesson: identify a problem that compounds over time, build repeat behaviour into the model and let the revenue do the convincing

Wecasa was founded in France in 2016 by Nicolas Royer and Edouard Macq - two people who looked at the chaos of modern family life and decided someone should do something about it.

The platform lets you book home services - cleaning, beauty, massage, childcare - quickly, reliably and without the usual faff of finding someone decent, agreeing a price and hoping they actually turn up. 

One app, vetted professionals, bookable seven days a week from 7am to 10pm. The service list is, let's say, comprehensive. Whatever you need doing - and I mean whatever - Wecasa has probably got someone for it. I'll leave that there.

Strip back the cleaning services, the beauty appointments and the childcare bookings, and what Wecasa was really selling was relief from the mental load. The remembering. The scheduling. The chasing. The reorganising when something falls through. The constant background hum of knowing that if you don't sort it, nobody will. 

As you’d imagine, the market turned out to be enormous. Families across France and the UK are stretched thinner than ever - working longer, juggling more and increasingly willing to pay for help. The numbers back it up: 

By the time they went to raise, they were pitching something already working, already profitable and already embedded in the weekly routines of hundreds of thousands of families.

And miraculously, the pitch wasn't about AI trying to replace the humans doing it.

In 2024, Wecasa raised €18M. The round was led by Serena, with participation from blisce/ and iXO Private Equity. Three big-shot investors, all wanting in - and in a fundraising environment that most founders would describe as somewhere between "challenging" and "soul-destroying", they had competing offers.

So what made Wecasa so irresistible to investors? Because People care about their problem and having a solution to it. Full stop. 

AI, for all the noise around it, is just a tool to get other things done - and if you're an investor, you always trace things back to the same question: what human problem actually needs solving here? Wecasa had a very clean answer to that question. Millions of people, every single day, drowning in domestic admin with nowhere decent to turn.

The mental load compounds over time. More to juggle, more to organise, more to forget and feel guilty about later. For investors with a long enough view, that's a guarantee of sustained demand - and sustained demand makes for a very straightforward investment conversation.

And it wasn’t just a case of looking into the future. The proof was already sitting in years of trading data. Same families booking the same cleaner every fortnight. Same massage every month. Repeat behaviour like that makes revenue predictable, relationships sticky and accountants considerably less anxious.

The €18M reflects that confidence. It's going straight into expanding the platform - more services, broader geographic coverage and deeper product development, with the UK market forming a significant chunk of that plan.

Profitable, growing, recession-proof and genuinely useful. In 2024, that was apparently enough to start a bidding war. Who knew solving real problems still worked?!

Wecasa will sort the blow-dry and the clean house. Here's what you need to sort before your next raise.

Not a problem that sounds impressive in a pitch. A real, daily, persistent one that people are already trying to solve with whatever they can find. The mental load isn't seasonal - it doesn't ease up when the economy improves or take a holiday in August. If anything, it gets heavier. 

Wecasa built inside a problem that compounds over time regardless of what's happening in the wider economy. When you're raising capital, the question investors are quietly running through their heads is simple: will people still need this in three, five, ten years? 

The more persistent the problem, the more fundable the solution.

A single booking is a transaction. A family using the same cleaner every fortnight is a business. The difference is whether your product becomes part of someone's routine or just something they try once. Investors get excited about the first sale. They write cheques for the tenth, twentieth and fiftieth. 

Build for the repeat - that's what makes revenue predictable, relationships sticky and the raise significantly easier.

When you're solving something measurable - efficiency, cost reduction, time saved - the numbers make the pitch straightforward. When you're solving something emotional, like mental load, the conversation requires more work. Investors will want to understand how often the problem recurs, what people are already spending to solve it and what their genuine willingness to pay looks like. 

Wecasa could point to repeat bookings and a market of people already paying for cleaners and babysitters through less efficient means. That's how you price an emotional problem - not through gut feel, but through evidence of what people are already doing to address it.

Every marketplace has the same problem at the start: no customers means no service providers, and no service providers means no customers. It's a chicken and egg situation that kills most platforms before they ever get going.

I'll be straight with you - marketplace businesses are really, really hard to get off the ground. But once they're running properly, they're some of the most defensible businesses you can build. There's a great book on this by Andrew Chen called The Cold Start Problem - worth picking up if you're building anything marketplace-shaped.

The question investors will ask is simple: have you solved it? Either the problem is already behind you and the platform is growing on its own, or you've got a very clear plan for how you're going to get there. Know which camp you're in before you walk into the room.

Once you've got people on the platform, the next question is: at what point does it become indispensable? That's your atomic value - the minimum number of users needed before your platform stops feeling optional and starts feeling essential.

For example, Slack's magic number is three. With two people, someone could just send a WhatsApp. Add a third and suddenly Slack is doing something a group chat can't - threads, files, searchable history. A fourth joins, then a fifth, and before long nobody's leaving. 

For Wecasa, that moment comes when a family finds a cleaner they actually trust. Once that relationship exists, starting again somewhere else just isn't worth the effort.

Know your number. Ideally, have already hit it.

Wecasa walked into investor conversations with 150,000 customers, 60% growth and profitability already on the table. The pitch was straightforward because the proof was already there. 

You don't need to be that far along - but you do need something concrete. Revenue, retention, repeat purchase rate, customer lifetime value. Pick the metric that tells your story best and make sure it's pointing in the right direction before you start the conversation

The lesson is that the most fundable problems aren't always the most glamorous ones. They're the ones that affect millions of people, every single day, with no sign of letting up. Find that problem, solve it properly and the capital conversation gets a lot easier.

And if the capital side is something you're currently figuring out - whether that's structuring a raise, understanding your options or just knowing where to start - that's exactly what I do at FundOnion. Drop me a line: [email protected].

Till next time,

James