The ask
US$ 200,000 to buy distribution, not to build the product.
The platform is built, deployed and multilingual. This round pays for the one thing it does not have yet: customers who pay for it. Eighteen months of focused go-to-market, a small first hire wave, and the standards and compliance work that makes an enterprise buyer say yes.
The terms
Investment snapshot ·Closing Q3 2026
Post-MVP · pre-revenue · multilingual platform shipped
The cap, defended from both sides
A SAFE cap is a ceiling on conversion and an opening position — not a valuation and not a market multiple. No comparable transaction is cited here, because none has been verified. What follows is our own reasoning.
Why not lower
Because the product exists. Roughly two years of engineering, product, design, multilingual content and standards integration are already shipped and running at skaills.ai. On our own estimate, replacing that work at contracting rates would cost an amount of the same order as the cap itself. An investor entering at a lower cap would be pricing a company that still had to build the thing. To make the order of magnitude checkable rather than asserted: the median annual wage for software developers in the United States was USD 135,980 in May 2025, so two person-years of senior engineering is about USD 272,000 in salary alone — before employer costs, design, multilingual content, standards work or tooling. That is our own arithmetic over a published wage figure, not a valuation, and it is shown so you can redo it. Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook, “Software Developers, Quality Assurance Analysts, and Testers”, bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/software-developers.htm.
Why not higher
Because there is no revenue. No paying customers, no retention curve, one full-time founder. A higher cap would ask an investor to pay for traction that does not exist yet. We would rather price the next round from real revenue than defend an inflated cap without it.
Why this departs from the CEMI house convention
CEMI’s convention for an initiative round is a stake of about 16.7% — pre-money five times the ask, post-money six times it. Applied to US$ 200,000 that would mean a cap of six times the ask and the same 16.7% for the investor. This round does not do that: it keeps the US$ 2,000,000 post-money cap that skaills already published, so US$ 200,000 converts at 10.0% instead. The departure is deliberate and it runs in the investor’s direction on the one axis that matters here — the ask has doubled while the ceiling has not moved, so this round takes more capital at the same cap than the previous one did. What justifies the ceiling itself is the paragraph above: the money is not being asked for to build the product.
Use of funds
Percentages of US$ 200,000, and the spend behind each one.
| 40% | Product | US$ 80,000 | Layer-2 connective tissue (Mentor Matching, Skills Adjacency Map, Manager Co-pilot, Change Playbooks). ESCO and O*NET ingestion. Premium speech and multimodal upgrades. |
| 20% | Go-to-market | US$ 40,000 | Latin American HR-community partnerships, content, pilot deployments with case-study commitments, CRM and outreach infrastructure. |
| 15% | AI and infrastructure | US$ 30,000 | AI provider spend, Cloud Functions, Firestore and Storage at production scale, observability and error tracking. |
| 15% | Compliance and standards | US$ 30,000 | ESCO / O*NET attribution surfaces, ISO 27001 and SOC 2 preparation, verifiable-credential compatibility, legal and IP cleanup. |
| 5% | Founder | US$ 10,000 | A modest below-market salary. The round extends focus, not lifestyle. |
| 5% | Reserve | US$ 10,000 | Contingency for pilots, partnerships and unforeseen runway gaps. |
| 100% | Total | US$ 200,000 |
Runway
18 months at an average of US$ 11,111 a month. What it buys: the first wave of named, paying customers; two to three engineers and a go-to-market lead; the ESCO and O*NET work and the compliance groundwork an enterprise buyer asks for; and enough time to price the next round from revenue rather than from a story.
Ticket tiers, and what each one carries
Beyond the equity the SAFE converts into, each tier carries these rights. The minimum ticket is US$ 20,000; the round has room for up to 10 of them.
From
US$ 20,000 – US$ 49,999
What it carries
- Named in the cap table at conversion
- Quarterly written investor update
From
US$ 50,000 – US$ 99,999
What it carries
- Everything above
- Information rights: annual financial statements and a refreshed diligence pack
- A direct line to the founder
From
US$ 100,000 and above
What it carries
- Everything above
- Pro-rata rights in the next priced round
- A board-observer seat, offered from US$ 150,000
What a ticket dilutes to
At the US$ 2,000,000 post-money cap. This is the only cap-table figure this kit publishes; the rest is available under NDA.
| Ticket | Stake at the cap |
|---|---|
| US$ 20,000 | 1.0% |
| US$ 50,000 | 2.5% |
| US$ 100,000 | 5.0% |
| US$ 200,000 | 10.0% |
Conversion-equivalent at the cap. Actual cap-table dilution materializes at the next priced round, and later rounds dilute it further.
What we are not raising for
- Not to build the product. It is built, deployed and in use.
- Not to fund a research bet. Every instrument described in this kit exists and runs today.
- Not to pay market salaries. The founder line is a modest below-market salary; the round extends focus, not lifestyle.
- Not to buy growth we cannot service. The hiring plan is sized to what eighteen months can absorb, not to what the round could afford.
Minimum viable close, and when
The round closes in Q3 2026, no later than 30 September 2026. The minimum viable close is US$ 100,000: below that the round does not close, the company continues at its current burn on the platform that already exists, and we come back when there is revenue to price against. Committed capital is not drawn until the minimum is reached.
How this relates to the CEMI.ai group round
skaills is one initiative inside CEMI.ai. The group states the relationship between the two levels like this:
Each initiative raises at its own level, for its own plan. CEMI.ai raises at group level, for the shared platform, the labs and the pipeline that every initiative is built on. An investor may enter at either level, and the two amounts are complementary, not alternatives: money into an initiative funds that company’s plan, money into the group funds the machinery all of them run on.
Every revenue stream, with the price we publish for it and who pays, is set out on its own page.
The rest of the kit
Carlos Miranda Levy
Coordinator of CEMI’s Enhanced Intelligences
skaills is an initiative of CEMI — Collectively Enhanced Multiple Intelligence.
skaills.ai investor kit