Should I bring someone onto my team to help me get investor meetings? (I will not promote)

Hey guys, I’m looking for some advice regarding fundraising, especially from anyone who has dealt with a similar situation. For some context, I’m currently in Canada. I don’t have a U.S. visa, but I’ve been building my startup in the U.S. in an almost blue-collar industry that is extremely crowded and fragmented, and where trust and relationships matter more than anything else. For the first year, I worked on it part-time. For the second year, I went full-time. During this entire time, I’ve been focused on understanding the industry and building relationships, talking to all different kinds of stakeholders, understanding how the industry works, developing distribution channels, validating the problem, testing the product, rebuilding it, testing it again, and continuing to refine it based on what I learned. Not being able to physically go to the U.S. has definitely made things more difficult, but we’ve still made a lot of progress. I’ve onboarded and offboarded multiple people along the way because it has been a learning process for me as well. It definitely hasn’t been a straight path, especially when it comes to the technical side and the people I’ve worked with. But when it comes to the industry itself , I feel like I’ve built some really strong relationships. The distribution channels we’ve developed are strong, and the advisors we have are people who have been in this industry for decades and are very well connected. Now comes the problem. We’ve reached a point where I feel we have validated the problem and the product enough to really start executing on the next phase. I’ve also almost completely exhausted my personal resources, so we’re now trying to raise funding to keep moving forward. But I have basically no network within the VC/startup ecosystem. I recently started reaching out to investors, but I’m not even getting meetings. My emails don’t get responses, and I’m finding it extremely difficult to get through the door. The more popular VCs are also very difficult to reach, and I don’t know the right way to approach this ecosystem because I spent the last two years building relationships within my industry rather than within the VC world. I would love to hire someone to help, but because I’m currently bootstrapping and have exhausted most of my resources, I can’t really afford the companies that charge upfront fees to help founders fundraise. So I’m wondering if I should find one person who already has relationships with investors and can help me get in the room. I’m not looking for someone to raise the money for me or negotiate on my behalf. All I want is to start getting investor meetings, just the opportunity to get in front of investors and have a conversation. Do you think bringing someone onto the team specifically for this makes sense? If so, what kind of person should I be looking for, where would I find someone like this, and how would you structure the compensation, equity, cash after the raise, or some combination? For context, I’m building a company that is not AI-based . We’re building an infrastructure layer for an established industry, with a trust layer for the consumers who use services within that industry. There are multiple components to what we’re building, but the core is creating infrastructure and trust within an industry that currently operates across many disconnected systems.