Take Claus Moseholm, co-founder of GoViral, a Danish company created in 2005 to harness the then-emerging power of the Internet to deliver advertisers’ video content in viral fashion. Funding his company’s steady growth with the proceeds of one successful viral video campaign after another, Moseholm and his partners built GoViral into Europe’s leading platform to host and distribute such content. In 2011, GoViral was sold for $97 million, having never taken a single krone or dollar of investment capital. The business had been funded and grown entirely by its customers’ cash.

https://hbr.org/2014/08/vc-funding-can-be-bad-for-your-start-up/