Looking for tips to raise Series A if you're bootstrapped. (I will not promote)

Much of the dialogue about raising series A is about your business fundamentals. We have those (PMF, Fortune 50 paying customers, AI moat, profitability, zero churn, big vision / upside). Yet for the life of me, we can't seem even get conversations with investors for an expanded GTM. Challenge we have is that we're looking for a significant raise, but there aren't a lot of folks who write big checks, and those that do seem very hard to meet. We're not physically located in SF or NYC. CEO is focused on the product but is willing to take a week or two for "a bunch of meetings with VCs." But we're struggling to tee up a roadshow. I suspect AI is causing VC to get flooded with outreach. Is the play to go to a conference like HumanX or Tech Crunch? Do we need to be linkedin denizens? Should we just start showing up at startup events in SF? Do we need to grind more on custom cold emails? I've seen the idea of reaching out to companies that have received funding and asking for a warm intro, but even that intro is cold right now. We haven't tried asking our existing customers for intros to VC, though I suspect they could. Any outside the box ideas are welcome. Non-promotional context: Enterprise SaaS, system of systems ERP type software. Competitors would be Oracle, SAP, Palantir, etc.