Raising in naira or in dollars

If costs are in naira and the raise is in dollars, a shift in the exchange rate changes how many months you have without a single thing changing inside the company. That works in both directions and it is not a rounding error at the scale most early companies operate.

The practical response is to report runway in the currency you spend, and to say which rate and which date you used whenever you convert. A runway figure with no stated rate is not a measurement.

This sounds obvious and it is the single most common source of financial confusion in early-stage reporting. A cheque range in dollars compared against a raise in naira produces a comparison that means nothing unless somebody chose a rate, and usually nobody did.

GTM will not do that conversion for you. When an investor's cheque range and a founder's raise are in different currencies, the match is marked as not compared and the reason is shown. Converting at a rate the platform does not hold would be inventing a number and presenting it as a result.

One for whoever builds your internal systems. Money should be held as whole minor units, kobo or cents, beside an explicit currency field, never as a floating point number.

A sibling product in this company once shipped a hundred-fold payment error because a kobo figure crossed a boundary that expected naira. It cost real money and it was caught by luck. If your spreadsheet, your database and your payment provider do not agree on the unit, you will find out through a payout, which is the worst possible way to find out.

A valuation agreed in dollars and paid into a naira business means the local value of the round is set on the day the money converts, not the day terms were agreed. Between signing and closing, that difference can be material.

Agree in the term sheet which currency the valuation is denominated in and when conversion happens. This is an unglamorous clause that founders skip and later wish they had read.

Foreign investment into a Nigerian company normally involves a Certificate of Capital Importation obtained through the receiving bank, which is what makes later repatriation of dividends or exit proceeds possible.

This is a matter for your lawyer and your bank rather than for a website, and this page is not legal advice. It is on the list because founders discover it late, and a missing certificate is a problem that is expensive to fix afterwards and cheap to handle at the time.

• Runway — How many months you can keep going before the money runs out.
• Burn rate — How much more money leaves the company each month than comes in.
• Valuation — The price agreed for the company in a round, not a measure of its worth.
• Dilution — The reduction in your ownership share when new shares are issued.

This guide is general information about how investors read a business and how to present one. It is not investment advice, not legal advice, and not tax advice. For anything specific to your company, take professional advice from someone who knows your situation.