Yeah, I read all these comments and they miss the obvious answer.
Pitch large vcs and ask for a lot of money.
It goes against the YC grain, but it is the reason there are silicon valley vcs. It used to be that starting a company meant building chips and buildings and assembly lines, and some vcs are structured to write 30m series a, 50m total to build product, and then 50 to scale. A friend of mine is doing this in the database world right now.
If there is a 15m regulatory barrier, then your pitch is why your team is the right one to bet on, and you raise 30m. The money is out there, you can take it
Responding to a few other replies to this thread, you can see funds that give 30mm+ seed/A rounds in Crunchbase or Pitchbook. That’s not to say those rounds are a fund’s specific thesis or the norm, only that it’s possible.
It's worth noting that licenses can represent assets of a company and have value in liquidation scenarios. Someone else looking for a license may just buy your failing company for $11m and get a $13m license.
Pretty much every large tech company you've ever heard of was VC backed originally. Facebook is a recent example with a couple of the VCs putting in 500 million in a later round (see http://fortune.com/2011/01/11/timeline-where-facebook-got-it...) Also see more recent examples with fairly capital intensive companies like Uber and Lyft. The odds of getting tens of millions of dollars in the very first round is unlikely. But that's also an unreasonable ask by unproven founders: you'd need to show that you have some clue what you're doing with smaller amounts in the earlier rounds... Apple got <$1m from their first investor.
Pitch large vcs and ask for a lot of money.
It goes against the YC grain, but it is the reason there are silicon valley vcs. It used to be that starting a company meant building chips and buildings and assembly lines, and some vcs are structured to write 30m series a, 50m total to build product, and then 50 to scale. A friend of mine is doing this in the database world right now.
If there is a 15m regulatory barrier, then your pitch is why your team is the right one to bet on, and you raise 30m. The money is out there, you can take it