Now, this is not an answer to your original question, more of questioning your premise. If it could prevent a fatal round, all the better... Beware, many assumptions and hypotheticals incoming...

You state that: >we have too many customers and we cannot fullfill the pipeline and we need to grow

Is that customers or leads? Anyway, many customers and you cannot fulfill the pipeline, therefore your solution is to grow, therefore you're looking for money, therefore looking for investors.

You also state that: >We are ~1M ARR and growing like hell.

You already are growing like hell, why do you need investors' money? Have you tried other things?

These lead to many questions that may be useful to others as well...

Have your founders been the only ones doing sales so far and you now want to hire sales people to speed things up and scale and you decided you need money to do this?

Have you tested that non-founders can sell the product before deciding to ramp up your sales force? i.e: Would adding more sales people actually result in more revenue (and profit) or would they just be frustrated because you haven't set the "sales motion", prepared "sales assets", and set them up for success? Have you tried to do that with one person or two other than founders. You can start small and see where your sales process breaks when someone else does it.

You can't fulfill your pipeline... Which part, exactly? Is it qualifying? closing? etc. Can you find the phase that's causing back-pressure and get someone else to help just on that one and see if you can scale yourself that way for a portion of the pipeline?

Are your unit economics ready for scaling or will you be losing money? Money amplifies what you add it to, including chaos.

Have you reduced your sales complexity? Figuring out your sales process, breaking it up into steps, refactoring it, etc...

Have you analyzed your cash flow and looked into ways to improve it? How are you getting paid? Yearly or multi-year contracts with payment up-front or at the end of the contract? It changes something if you're getting paid before.

Even if you do all that and actually need money, have you considered getting the money from your clients? For example, a multi-year contract with payment up front so you have capital right now to do what you need to do, especially if your asking ticket is within the same order of magnitude of your ARR. That won't be money for equity, it won't even be debt; it'll be a sale which, if you ever talk with investors, would be positive.

Yes, the situation is that we need to grow our team, actually on two directions. One is sales itself, is very simple, adding more sales power is bringing in the end more money. Secondly, customers are big enterprises, and they have special requests for better matching their use cases. Unsurprisingly, they want us to grow and honestly, we did what you suggested to get money from them in advance. This is how we managed very well until now.

But our product has so much traction now, that we do not need too much outbound sales but managing the inbound requests. This is where you say, OK, now we need to grow masively and this can only be done with VC money because growing organically is too slow.

We are very well underway with EU based VCs. They are nice and all good but too old style and coming up with a lot of conditions which feel off. From what I could read around, the US based VC are in anyway faster and they seem to understand easier the speed of our current business. So.. question still remains, how one reaches US investors.