How Two Yale Students Landed a $1M Investment Over Dinner with Their AI Social Platform

The Power of Being in the Right Place at the Right Time

Being at the right place at the right time led Yale University’s Nathaneo Johnson and Sean Hargrow to hit the jackpot with their startup, Series.

Balancing Entrepreneurship and Academics

The founders are the masterminds behind Series, an AI social platform capturing the attention of Generation Z. While many may wonder how Johnson, a computer science and economics major, and Hargrow, a neuroscience major, balance entrepreneurship with academics, the duo clarified that dropping out of Yale University was never an option. Instead, they’ve learned to set boundaries as they navigate building their platform and establishing themselves in the venture capital landscape.

During the AFROTECH™ U Summit at AFROTECH™ Conference 2025 in Houston, Hargrow said, “You really can’t do the outstanding job of being a good founder and being profitable and raise a round, and do all these things that we want and are aspiring to do if you hedge. And that hedging is when you’re trying to get your homework in by 12, but you also want to raise a million dollars before you graduate school. You got to pick one or the other.”

He continued, “So, what we were able to do is very much so pick what we wanted to do, but remember our kind of bounds as young Black men. To get into those rooms, the only thing that was really getting us into those rooms was… Yale. So I couldn’t just drop out like a lot of other minorities and white children might have the privilege to do, because they have a pipeline of succession behind them or maybe their parents did it. But for us, totally thrown into this unknowing, unbeknownst to what entrepreneurship was, we realized, let’s just play it safe and not hedge our bets. Let’s go all in on one dream.”

Achieving Historic Funding

That dream so far encompasses a historic $3.1 million in pre-seed funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz Partner Anne Lee Skates (now with Parable VC), which set a new precedent for Ivy league students, as AFROTECH™ previously reported.

Key Fundraising Insights

Johnson revealed a learning lesson for conference attendees to consider as it relates to their fundraising process. He emphasized the need to understand how the game works, such as the valuation price of what investors will pay for an idea, and not be discouraged by metrics such as needing 100,000 users or $60,000 in reoccurring revenue to be attractive to investors.

Not discounting themselves and remaining true to the Series vision led to a significant investment halfway through a late dinner.

“You just need to talk to the right person,” Johnson said. “That’s why we built Series. We built Series to help people connect with those who could provide that mutualistic value. And if we had picked Series, which essentially, in my opinion, was an idea, we had a few thousand users. We had an MVP built, but I know there’s millions of products to have an MVP built and a few thousand users. We just ended up talking to the right person at the right time. We understood the value add of what our product can do for a certain community. And that obvious belief in what that product can do is what pushed her over to, in a dinner, say, ‘Oh, you guys are raising $1.5 million, let me just close that extra million dollars.’ Craziest moment that we’ve had so far in our lives.”

He affirmed, “There’s probably a person in this world who’s someone out of the 8 billion people around us that would probably want to have a dinner with any of you guys, and give you guys a million dollars. Someone who’s into philanthropic efforts, someone who’s into investing early, who believes in the sort of mission and impact of what you’re building, and the person is waiting for you to meet them. So it’s more about how do you target your outreach, how do you approach your investment, and most importantly, who are you talking to to ensure that what you’re building early gets funded early.”