Praveer Khare has invested his own money since he was 12.
Building a tool for investors in Singapore showed him the harder problem was on the other side: founders without a network, trying to work out whether they're ready to raise.
Olnest gives early-stage founders a free place to get investor-ready, and lets investors find verified startups and ask for an intro.
With its first cohort starting at the end of November, Praveer shares what he's learned about finding customers, and why he wishes he'd started interviewing founders sooner.
What made you build Olnest, and who is it for?
I started out building for investors because I am one. I've invested my own money since I was 12, and I kept hitting a problem that people around me had too: no single place to see where your money stands.
Building that taught me the founder's side. Building is the easy part now. Everything around it is hard: finding a co-founder, finding investors, finding help that doesn't cost a fortune. Lots of founders spend money on an idea before checking there's a real problem behind it.
Small family offices and VCs told me the same thing from the other side. Early-stage deal flow is scattered, and they don't have time to check every startup.
Olnest is for both. It's for founders without an investor network, and for investors who want startups that have already been checked.
How does it work for a founder getting ready to raise?
A founder starts free. They get a readiness score out of 100 that shows what to fix first, and they upload evidence like financials, revenue and contracts.
Then they practise. You can pitch to an AI investor in writing or on a live voice call, and it grades you every time. Most founders' first real pitch is to someone who matters. This lets you get the bad ones out of the way first.
We check every startup before investors can see it. Financials sit on a private server until our team has verified them, then they're deleted and the founder gets a verified badge. Investors can then find the startup and ask for an intro. The founder decides who to meet.
Founders also get volunteer mentors, and agencies we've vetted for legal, accounting, marketing and hiring.
What has the response been like since you started onboarding founders?
Our first ten paying customers make up our first cohort, which starts at the end of November. Some of the warmest feedback has come from founders in Ghana, Senegal, the Philippines and Australia.
We've also partnered with Lantern Consulting at Macquarie University in Sydney. Their consultants work through a real question with a startup we've checked, and the founders keep the findings.
The thing founders say most is that starting a company feels less daunting when it's all in one place.
What do you charge?
Olnest starts free. The Seed plan gives you the readiness score, evidence uploads, a monthly pitch practice and a listing once you're approved.
Paid plans add unlimited practice, voice calls and more. New joiners get founding prices: Scale at US$39 a month and Growth at US$139, down from $49 and $199. Both start with a free trial.
We Are Founders readers get more. Use the code WEAREFOUNDERS for a 7-day free trial of Scale, and you keep the founding price whenever you join.
We take no equity and no cut of anyone's raise. If a bootstrapped founder needs help with the cost, I'd rather talk than lose them.
What are your biggest running costs?
Our biggest costs are AI tools and model usage, followed by hosting and infrastructure.
We’ve kept marketing spend low, apart from a few small paid social tests. We focused on partnerships with founder communities and incubators, which keeps our customer acquisition cost down.
As revenue grows, we’ll start marketing to individual startups and let that acquisition spend rise with it.
Which channel brought your first ten customers?
Interviews. I spoke to people who fit our ideal customer to check the problem was real. The ones who really had it became our first ten paying customers, and they make up our first cohort.
Now we work through founder communities. Community leaders get something useful for their members, and we get a steady pipeline.
What did you try that failed?
Cold, one-to-one outreach. Building a relationship with each founder worked far better.
When you talk to people as a friend trying to solve their problem, they’re happy to share it, and you learn much more. Some days an idea looked brilliant and the next day it looked terrible. Each of those failures taught us something.
Which tools do you pay for?
I'm the only engineer. I write a brief for every change, AI tools (mostly Claude, plus ChatGPT and Grok) write much of the code, and I review everything before it ships. More than 5,000 automated checks run before anything goes live.
I'm not doing it all alone, though. Jiunnhern Lim, a student at the University of Melbourne, helps on the marketing side and runs our socials.
Supabase and Vercel run the backend and hosting. Then there's GitHub, Figma, ElevenLabs for voice, Higgsfield for video and Wispr Flow for dictation.
What would you do differently in the first 90 days?
I started building straight away. I'd stop, make a plan, and start customer interviews the next day.
Building is fast now. I decided to build the founder side of Olnest on 27 September, and it was live and taking payments three days later. Code isn't the slow part any more. Knowing what to build is. A week of real conversations can change your whole direction.
Which founders inspire you, and why?
Sara Blakely, because she built Spanx with no investors and no network by focusing on a real problem first. That’s exactly what I wish I’d done in my first 90 days.
And Paul Graham, because Y Combinator proved that early founders need a community around them, not just capital.
We want startups to be looked after. I think founders will have far more say in how they're supported, and the investors who back that will do best. We want to bring on investors and startups that make a difference in the world and in their own communities.
What comes next
Olnest's first cohort starts at the end of November, and the company is opening to family offices looking for verified early-stage deal flow. Next, Praveer wants more university partners like Lantern. His advice for anyone starting out is the lesson that brought him his first customers: talk to people before you build.
Founders can start free at olnest.com. We Are Founders readers can use the code WEAREFOUNDERS for a seven-day free trial of Scale and keep the founding price of US$39 a month instead of US$49.
