S2EP8: It Takes 99 Duds to Find Your Stud with Aagya Mathur

He was never interested in investing. He just liked feeling powerful.

So he took Aagya Mathur to dinner, told her why her company would fail, and picked up the check because he was “older and richer.”

Nobody warns you about those kinds of investors, the ones who treat your pitch as entertainment and your time as theirs to waste. Aagya sat through that dinner and then built a playbook so she’d never have to do it again.

In this episode of The Capital Flex, I sit down with Aagya Mathur, co-founder and CEO of Aavia, an app and data platform that unlocks insight into how hormones impact everything from sleep and energy to mental health and injury risk. With over 85 million longitudinal data points, Aavia can flag various conditions (e.g., PMOS, PMDD) that typically take 7-10 years to diagnose, decreasing downstream conditions and costs. It also helps inform daily personalized recommendations to optimize her lived experience.

We get into two investor moves nobody talks about: stringing a founder along for months with no intention of closing, and signing commitment paperwork for a check that was never real. 

We also discuss what actually moves the needle, knowing your numbers cold, building a cross-gender founder network, and why broadening your category on your own terms beats letting an investor do it for you.

 Key Takeaways:

• When an investor keeps moving the goalposts, that’s a no. Stop waiting for a different answer.
• Male founders move through this ecosystem differently than female founders, which is why cross-gender networks are so important. Build those connections before you need them; it creates visibility into strategies that could help.
• Female investors can carry the same biases as male investors. Shared gender is not shared experience.
• Don't let a category label define your investor pool. If the framing isn't working, change it. It’s not compromise – it’s strategy.

My Reflection:

The restaurant story hit me the hardest. Aagya walked in prepared and polished. She was ready. But it didn’t matter, because there was no pitch. Just a man performing power over a subpar dinner.

No amount of planning will prepare you for someone who shows up with no intention of investing. That's not a failure of preparation. That's the failure of a system that keeps letting the wrong kind of men into the room.

But Aagya didn't let the dinner define her, or slow her down. She just recalibrated and kept showing up. Which is all any of us can do.

This Week’s Challenge:

1. Before your next investor conversation, do your homework on the fund. When did they last write a check? How much of the fund has been deployed? Have they ever had to return capital? These are not aggressive questions. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
2. Find one male founder in your network who has been through your current fundraising stage. Ask what their term sheets look like and what they flagged as predatory. That intel is free, so use it.
3. If an investor misses your agreed-upon timeline, give them one more date. Just one. If they miss that, move on. You don’t wait for anyone.

Links and Resources:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/aagyamathur/ 

https://www.linkedin.com/company/aavia/ 

https://aavia.io/ 

https://www.instagram.com/aavia.io/

If you enjoyed this conversation, follow The Capital Flex, leave a rating, and share this episode with a founder who needs it.

And if you’re looking for a more candid space to talk fundraising, power, and building inside systems not designed for you, stay close. The conversation continues.

Production and Administration work completed by Smart Podcast Solutions and Elevate Business Solutions. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:02

This is the Capital Flex. I'm Naseem Sayani. This show codifies the Capital Playbook because no founder should have to learn the hard way. We talk about what really happens behind closed doors. The bias, the breakthroughs, and the things no one says out loud. If you've ever walked into a room and felt the system wasn't built for you, you're in the right place. Welcome to the Capital Flux. My guest today is Agia Mathor. She is the founder and CEO of Avia, a science-backed daily women's health app and data company that improves quality of life and facilitates faster clinical decision making. Ovarian hormones, as many of us know in our learning, impact quality of sleep, quality of muscle toning, mental health, risk of injury, energy level, and more. But 2.1 billion people around the world in their reproductive years don't have credible education or tools to optimize their lives based on these hormones. With 85 million longitudinal data points, Avia can flag various hormone conditions, PCOS, PMDD, and other things that typically take seven to ten years to diagnose, and AVIA can do it in just three to six months, decreasing downstream conditions and costs. The same data also helps inform daily personalized recommendations to optimize your good days and make your bad days better. Agya and I met a few years ago at New York Tech Week, and we became fast friends. She's savvy and focused, and I have been such a fan of everything she's building ever since. I'm so excited to have you here with me today. Thank you so much for joining.

SPEAKER_00 1:35

Thanks so much for having me, Nassim. I am looking forward to this conversation. I've loved getting to know you and chatting with you over the last couple of years, and I think we're gonna have a good conversation today.

SPEAKER_02 1:48

I think so. These conversations have all been so interesting and so fun, and the insights have just been exciting and interesting, and the nuggets are great. So if you could, for everyone listening, introduce yourself just a little bit more and give us a few more sentences about Avia and what you're building.

SPEAKER_00 2:01

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, thank you so much for such a great intro on Avia itself. Really, the things that I've done in my professional career as well as a lot of my own personal health experiences have come together and culminated in Avia. So Avia, I really started because no one ever told me the whole truth about my own health. Much longer story, but after a number of challenges, uh started looking into things myself of what's going on, why is this happening? Why are different doctors telling me to do different things? And honestly, it was making things worse. And I'm a science nerd. So I studied neuroscience in undergrad. I took the NCAT that I was going to do my MD PhD. I did my thesis in biomedical engineering, all of that good stuff. So I dove into the research to understand what's going on and came across the world of ovarian hormone health, your ovarian hormones impact quality of sleep to quality of muscle training, energy levels, x-dry of skin, mental health, mood, risk of injury, and so much more. And I was captain of my basketball team. I would have had my teams train differently if I would have known. I would have taken the MCAT differently, all of these things. And so I, when I was introduced to my co-founder, then just as a friend, she had her own experiences, which uh was around losing her vision with migraines. That's incredible that that happens. It's wild. Yeah, and we were at MIT, different doctors are looking for different brain damage, eye damage, different disorders. And not one person asked her when in your menstrual cycle does this happen. It was her own tracking that took her there. So we realized we're two people, but this impacts half of the world's population, and we're going to do something about it. Enter Avia. And you explained Avia so nicely. So thank you so much for that, Nasine. I will just quickly add that this is really meant to be a personalized tool focused on being a data platform that helps you personally on a day-to-day basis, but then at a high level with trends and insights to help your doctor make better decisions as well. Plus, we have started partnering with a number of people throughout the healthcare ecosystem because we're really focused on the data. We have people come in and log their hormone behavior or their lived experiences on average four times a week. And so that's where we have over 85 million data points longitudinally, as you mentioned, which allows us to recommend the right services, products, doctors, you name it, at the right time for the right person, plus a really buzzy community. So people can check us out on the Google Play Store or the App Store if they're interested.

SPEAKER_02 4:46

Oh, that's great. I think it's so interesting and so fascinating, everything you've built. And then having a community wrapper around that uh just makes it, you know, this is women live in community and it's how we share information. So it must be working really great. The combination of the thing. So what we're about to do here today. Oh, absolutely. I know it's why we exist. So, as you know, the basis of the podcast is really to dig into the fundraising stories of female founders and the things that we that we go through when we're out trying to raise capital. And and a lot of it is the harder stories that we really only talk about over text or on email or in corners of conferences, and and uh and I wanted to pick all those stories up and talk about them out loud and share them more broadly so that other founders after us can learn and take notes and have a better way of walking into these rooms. Uh, and so to kick us off, if you think back on your fundraising experience, and I know you're still in the midst of it, if you could characterize your fundraising experience in like three words, let's say, what three words would you use? Oh my gosh, three words.

SPEAKER_00 5:46

I guess just for context for those listening, we have raised about three rounds of funding. And so I've, you know, each round is very different. Market is different, what you're looking for, and what you're where your company is different. I don't know if I have three words per se, but I think a few things that I'll say is one is I I want to start with the positive, quite frankly, because I think it's easy to be like, oh, female founders raising, it's only a nightmare. I had some great investors and very supportive, supportive round around, those who care about the impact, those who have supported us as humans, as well as us as a company. And I really believe that part of that is just it's a numbers game, too. It takes 99 duds to find your stud. And over 50% of our investors are females, over 50% of our investors are operators, so they're founders themselves. And it's been really powerful in how we have built our company. And I I really believe that you kind of get who gets it right away. But on top of that, then there's also been some not so great experiences, which is honestly just too bad. I think one of the things that investors either don't realize or they forget, I'm not sure what it is, is that founders talk to other founders. Yeah. Yeah, I know. We talk to our own investors about what's going on in the ecosystem, who to avoid, and then some of our own investors who's blacklisted investors based off of our experiences.

SPEAKER_02 7:23

Oh, yeah. Oh, I'm sure that happens. Absolutely. I'm I have a few that I've told founders like, don't talk to them. It's just it's not a positive experience. It's not worth taking their money. So take us through maybe one of your harder experiences.

SPEAKER_00 7:36

Yeah, I think that there's definitely been different flavors of challenging experiences. Maybe there's actually two stories I can take you through hand in hand that kind of have the similar takeaways, if that works for you. Yeah, sure. Yeah. Great. So one of them a little bit lighter, where there was a fund where a big part of it was the I forget now actually if they're female founder focused or women's health focused, but their whole thing was like we're very friendly towards you, your company. We're going to get you an answer right away. We don't drag things along. But then, you know, they said that they we'd have an answer in six weeks. And over about a six-month period, they would ghost us every four weeks. And it's one of those things where they're like, Oh, we're almost over the line. Oh, we're almost over the line, and ask for so much information, ask for so much time, and then not really come back with anything. So that's one. And then we had a investor who was talk, had been talking to us for months, had done due diligence with us, signed paperwork saying that how much they were investing, and then told us that they didn't have the funds.

SPEAKER_02 8:47

Oh no, come on, really? Yes. I've heard so many of these recently. What's the what's the red flag for you now? How do you or how do you safeguard those things now? Do you have a method?

SPEAKER_00 9:00

I think that there is and there isn't, right? If this is a fund that's you has funded other companies, you know that you have a lot of mutual connections, whatever it might be, I think you would know if there are any red flags to look out for. I think that what I did was like was trying to take a risk, if you will, or I was trying to work with a newer fund that was not as established. So I I don't know. Like, I don't want to say that I wouldn't work with a new fund again because I don't think that that's fair. Right. I think that I would ask more questions. And my investors also were they themselves said that they didn't see this coming. And now, like, we would all look into these things together beforehand if it's not a fund that we like actively know and has invested in other companies.

SPEAKER_02 9:55

Right, right. And so questions, questions could be things like when was your last investment? How many checks have you written? How much of the fund has been raised? Are you calling capital? Have your LPs refunded, right? Like things so you can get a sense of whether they have money in the bank to deploy is are things that all of us can be asking to make sure they can actually write a check or find a check.

SPEAKER_00 10:16

I mean, I had another investor who again, another this is another time, didn't impact us at that time at all. But I had an investor who asked for the paperwork and to sign and then to fund, and then between and they were like vetted all of that. I mean, they were a newer fund, but introduced from one of my investors. They, you know, spoke highly of them, things like that. And they then asked for the paperwork, sent us their signature block, and then came back and were like, hey, we found a different opportunity that this same funding is going to go into now, and we have to take it. So we're not going to be investing in your company.

SPEAKER_01 10:58

And you're like, wait, what? What?

SPEAKER_00 11:02

But this just goes back to don't count on the money until it's in your bank. You could have somebody choosing you, you could have somebody signing the paperwork, anything like that. It doesn't matter. And in some of these scenarios, it didn't quite, it didn't end up mattering because you know, you have backup funds that are ready that will invest and things like that, but definitely learned a lot from those experiences where then you're like, okay, how do you and your existing investors make sure that, okay, if you are going to take a risk or you yourself are investing in a new fund to invest in you, how do you make sure that that is reputable and to protect yourself as well?

SPEAKER_02 11:49

Right, right. Well, and it's so interesting to make that kind of decision after sending a signature block and doing those steps to then say, oh, just kidding, we're gonna go invest in something else. Because you know the founder is you're making other commitments based on what capital you think you have, and you don't think somebody, an investor who gets that far, is then going to pull back because of another opportunity. Because once something has gone through the investment committee and you've said yes, you want to believe that that's near confirmed, right? You're kind of past the 90% line and it's not going to change. But that's I've seen this happen a few times, but it's not always the case.

SPEAKER_00 12:28

I've literally had friends, companies who's who've had to shut down because it's been the lead check.

SPEAKER_02 12:34

I've seen that too.

SPEAKER_00 12:34

I'm grateful it was not our lead check in any of those scenarios. And you know, you have others who are already who you had been chat chatting with and can bring in other additional funds. But I I think just more and more recently, the way one of my investors, who's also a founder, says it is just such bad behavior right now. A lot of investors or funds. And again, there are some lovely investors, some great experiences, but you have to know that these negative ones can be coming. And the thing that her and I were talking about also is just again, the money's not set until the money's in your bank, right? And so don't rely on it.

SPEAKER_02 13:20

Can't count it until it's been wired and until it hits the bank. You just don't even rely on it until it's there.

SPEAKER_00 13:25

Yeah. And then now, like I a lot of my main investors have blacklisted a lot of these investors, which is also kind of unfortunate. Not that maybe I shouldn't feel bad for them, but why are you doing that?

SPEAKER_02 13:39

Yeah, yeah. Why behave that way? Because you'll be left out of rounds, right? You'll get left out of what you want to be in the good deals, and now you're not going to get into the good deals because you've been blacklisted. Goodness. So are there other crazy experiences that you want to share? Do you have one or two others before we start to like summarize up big insights and takeaways?

SPEAKER_00 14:00

I was debating as we were starting this conversation if I would share this or not. But yes, there's one of my from my very first, I guess before we even ever started fundraising, that I will just never forget. And I think I sh I want to share this less of because honestly, I don't know that there were any learnings, but I wish I, if it wasn't the very first conversation, I would have been better prepared to react to certain things. Yeah. And at that point, we weren't, we hadn't even started our first round, but we had a fund that was kind of hoarding us, if you will. So if we've got some time, I'm happy to share that. Yes, please, absolutely. Tell us. Okay, so we had this again, as I mentioned, this was early, early on. We hadn't even re started raising a first round. We were out of MIT, so we were grateful that we had some non-dilutive funding that kicked us off, right? There was a fund that started reaching out to my co-founder and I. The team had taken my co-founder out to dinner, was schmoozing her, was saying how much they were telling her how much they loved what we're doing, why they love it, all of these other things. And were basically trying to get us to open around funding or take their money, whatever it might be. And then the final step was for me to meet one of their managing partners. I've I haven't even started this fundraising process yet, this journey researching what it's like. I had done my independent study on just raising as a first-time female founder, but had never put it into action before. So I was like, okay, let's go try this out. And so eventually the a meeting was set. It was set for it's in New York City. I didn't live in New York at that time, but the managing partner asked us to meet there, which is totally normal, totally fine. And I get to the place where he asked us to meet, and it's this what feels like this like mobster Italian restaurant. Oh no. And I had looked it, I had looked it up, right? And I knew it was a restaurant. I guess I just thought that that was normal for a first meeting rather than a cafe or at an office or something, which I've never had a first meeting at a in the evening at a at a restaurant, right? And he is, you know, just like trying to chat a little bit and starts referring and is sharing just like personal things to start, and is referring. I don't know if it's his girlfriend, his wife, whatever it might be. He's referring to her as I'm going make this up, but as her 50-year-old Indian partner. And you're like, really? Doesn't give a name, doesn't say anything, but refers to her by her race every single time. So interesting.

SPEAKER_02 16:58

I was like, okay, what for? Like, what's the motivation to characterize someone that way?

SPEAKER_00 17:03

You know, I don't know. So already off to like this interesting start, then starts talking about our business, telling me all the reasons our company's going to fail. Oh my god, no kidding.

SPEAKER_02 17:15

Why would he take you out to dinner just to tell you all the reasons he doesn't want to invest? He should just not do the dinner, just don't do it.

SPEAKER_00 17:23

I wish I knew the answers to these things. Yeah. I never followed up. He never followed up. I think I don't actually just disappeared. Yeah, I was gonna go. What happened next? Like, was there any overall follow-up? Let me look into that and get back to you because I want to believe. I hope I didn't follow up. Maybe I wouldn't have followed up. Yeah, right. Um, maybe I still did back then, just out of maybe I followed up with his team because that's who we were in touch with. There's no way he would have done this to a male counterpart of mine. Not one bit, not at all. Yeah, you know, as I talked to, and I think that's something that's really important, quite frankly, is to talk to your male founders. Like we can't just silo ourselves as female founders. Yeah, no one experienced anything like this. Honestly, most female founders probably haven't experienced something like this, but nobody's been treated like that or just had this type of experience.

SPEAKER_02 18:17

So, so coming back to the the male founder friends point, like how how valuable has it been for you to have male founder friends that you can share notes notes with or bounce ideas with? How is how is that benefited? Because I've heard this a few times across a number of conversations.

SPEAKER_00 18:35

So I I don't want to say this as an females can't do this themselves, but it is really good to get benchmarks in terms of what they're seeing, what they're hearing, how they're negotiating and what's going on. So you don't, so you know that that's normal too. Uh one of my first investors in our pre-seed round was unshackled. If you know Maria Salmanaka, she was there and led that to start. And they, when I was raising my next round or to my seed round, which back then seed rounds were like one to two million dollars, and now they're like we had a term sheet, we had a couple of term sheets, and I was trying to figure out okay, like which how do we prioritize these? What do we do? And they had put me in touch with my now, I like to call him my friend Tony, who was who had just gone through the same situation. And so I remember it being 10, 11 p.m. And he would take my call at any time to just talk through, oh, these are kind of the numbers we saw, or this is how I went about this, or these are the things to look at in your term sheets, and just a slew of different things we would go back and forth on. And he was great in that sense. But that's just one example. But going back to your original question of how is that important, where is that important, it's just diversity, right? So it's also just as much male and female founders as it is people who are a stage ahead of you, a stage behind you. It's just as much as it is people who are in your industry, people who are not in your industry. And I think that that's a data point that we definitely shouldn't leave out and is very valuable.

SPEAKER_02 20:21

Right. Yeah, no, absolutely. Having the founder community itself kind of cross-gender, right, is really valuable regardless. And having those people around you across stages, across sectors, and the value of the learning that sits in the founder community, I find to be really incredible because there's so many different experiences sitting across the group that having people to look at term sheets before you sign anything is potentially one of the most valuable reasons to have other founders around you, especially ones that are ahead of you. I also add into that to have one or two investor friendlies in your in your community group because you want folks who are writing the term sheets that are willing to look at stuff and say, oh no, no, no, that that clause is predatory. Don't get that out of there before you sign it. Those things are incredible, incredibly helpful.

SPEAKER_00 21:10

Absolutely. And same of, you know, where I'm having experiences and can share my negative experiences, talking to as many people and getting a sense of have there been negative experiences. So I still remember with my with that same round where Tony was helpful, there was another founder who was really helpful to share. Hey, this you, the person who would actually be on your board, these have been our negative experiences with him.

SPEAKER_01 21:37

Oh, sure. Absolutely. Yeah, that's great insight. It's fantastic.

SPEAKER_00 21:41

You're just like, I'm gonna be married to this person. I don't want to work with that. Because I really liked the team, but then all of a sudden they kind of put this person who ran and spent much time on, and the term sheet is that would be the person who would join our board. And he, so I was like, I need to talk to somebody who's work. With this person. I can't just do that willy-nilly. And that was really helpful to understand that too.

SPEAKER_02 22:07

Yeah, absolutely. What is your perspective on kind of system-wise the things that could change that would help this all work better? Two or three things that you could you could wave a wand and fix. What would that be?

SPEAKER_00 22:21

You know, I I'll say I don't know that I have a magic bullet for this because I think there's a lot fundamentally, and then also there's just a lot of bias, unfortunately, right? And we can do as much as we want to try to play against that, but then all of that is on us as individuals, and is not unfortunately as much you could do from a systemic level. But I do think part of what we already started talking about was doing much more to integrate gender, integrate different sectors, integrate stages. I have I went to one too many female founder events, and then I was like, okay, I'm going to start prioritizing events where it's not just a female founder's and women's health, because that that then becomes pretty like it that then becomes almost an echo chamber where getting similar experiences. And how do we break out of that if we don't see other examples or we don't talk to other people as well? So I, you know, there was an investor who actually this must have been just late last year, who was in town and she brought together males, females across a lot of different sectors, and there was so much we could do to help each other and to learn. I'm sure. Yeah. Whereas at this point, all the female founders and women's health, I'm like, these are my friends. I can just text them. I know everybody, right, exactly. And so unless there's something that's a differentiated factor about it, I think that that becomes a bit much. You know, something else that I've found myself saying, at least as a women's health founder, is if there is something you can do with your business to almost reframe it as a health company. Yes, yes, agreed. I do think that that actually goes far. Fine, focus on the females or on the women's health side of it. But if you're unless that's something that's going to really set you apart in a crowded space, it might actually help to kind of bring it to be a little bit more broad, is something else that I think about as well.

SPEAKER_02 24:35

It's been coming up a lot. It's been coming up a lot. This really potential diss yeah, this we potentially we've done ourselves a disservice. Unfortunate. Yeah, a disservice by by characterizing and putting the language out there around women's health and and pushing so hard for it that it's maybe put us in a corner and we need to maybe leave it behind and talk about things in the verticals of conditions rather than the horizontal that is that we've created that is women's health, because then it's sex-based differences or it's it's things that we can then also talk about in the context of just humans, rather than having to only talk about it in the context of women, because then it it becomes inadvertently exclusive and it's not what we've wanted to do, but it's what it has been perceived as. And so how do we how do we break it, right? And not have that happen. If you could leave the founders that are listening with maybe two or three other must-nos or things that you think they have to keep in mind as they jump into fundraising, what would that be?

SPEAKER_00 25:44

One of them for sure is that from a fundraising perspective, it's a sprint, not a marathon. There's this concept of FOMO, there's this concept of I gotta keep up. I at least for the first couple of rounds of funding spent more time prepping than actually raising. And a big part of that is also once you start reaching out to people, you have to move fast so that you kind of keep people on similar timelines so that then you can be like, hey, like, you know, we're moving ahead with these company or with these funds or with these investors. And it's a big numbers game. I that's something that I have I have seen, unfortunately, also of oh, you know, I was talking to these 10 investors and they all seemed really interested. And so I didn't reach out to more. I'm like, reach out to as many investors. Oh, right. I always say it takes 99 duds to find your stud. And I think that that's really important. The other part is also just knowing your numbers inside out. This really depends on where you are in terms of stage of your company. So if this is your very first round and you're more of an ideas stage, maybe it's more of this is what we think can happen. But especially as you get into your next rounds of funding of what is retention already? What is the seven day? What's the 30 day? What's the if you have six months worth of data, what's the six months data? What is it in terms of conversion, click-through, whatever it might be? And knowing those numbers inside out, I'll never forget that was something that I had one investor who came to MIT talk about. And I'll, I'll just like I live by that now. I wanted to always know that. And then another one also is this is something that is for fundraising, but really should be for the business at large, is just working with your end user, listening to your end user, talking to your end user. We've been around for years now, and still every week, someone on my team is talking to at least two or three of our members to learn pain points, emotions, what's working, what's not working. And that way you're actually building something that they want, that they need. And then also, you know, we were just talking about the naysayers that helps with the grit against the naysayers, because you're like, I know either if especially if you didn't have the problem yourself, that this is helping all of these people. And we then need to improve our storytelling to help bring people along into this if they don't understand it or they don't get it. But if you can't, you know, build something that people want, build something people need, then it's like, why are we building anything at all? Right. Yeah, no, absolutely. It's great advice.

SPEAKER_02 28:25

It's really great. So, last question. How can everyone help you? What can we do to support your business, to support you?

SPEAKER_00 28:31

What can everyone listening go out and do? Thank you so much for asking that. Well, if you don't use Avia and you are of our demographic, please download Avia. You can find us on the App Store or Google Play. The second is also we're always integrating further and further into the healthcare ecosystem at large. And so if it's different service providers, it's providers themselves, it's brands, products, we're always recommending the right product or right service to the right person at the right time and would love to partner with even more. So if you know someone who would be a good fit for that, please send them my way as well.

SPEAKER_02 29:08

Oh, amazing. Well, thank you so much, Agia, for joining me, for dropping so many great insights and perspective and all the great advice for all the founders that are listening. This has been really, really tremendous, and I appreciate it so much.

SPEAKER_00 29:20

Of course. Thank you so much, Nassim, for bringing this conversation up as well. I always say that we don't talk about things that have gone wrong or things that don't go well enough. And it's always about the up and up, but we need to have more conversations like this as well. Amazing. And thank you so much.

SPEAKER_02 29:37

Thanks for listening to the Capital Flex. If today's episode hit home, share it with the founder you love and follow me on LinkedIn for more.