Question for Founders at Series A: how did you get your Initial Design Partners ? (i will not promote)

I’m currently building in the ai/ml infrastructure space, specifically around automating model training and fine-tuning workflows: from dataset preparation to training, evaluation, and deployment. we’re still pre-revenue / early build stage, and I’m trying to understand how experienced founders approached enterprise design partners or paid pilots before they had real traction. i’ve seen a lot of b2b and enterprise startups validate this way before scaling, but the actual process is still unclear from the ou