At the base of every successful technology company sits a close relationship between the entrepreneurs who brought the idea to life and the seed investors who fueled its early growth.

Those relationships are changing in profound ways. Early-stage investors must learn to understand and assess a new breed of entrepreneur. That includes founders from overseas raising capital in the US, women entrepreneurs blazing new trails in the valley's landscape and, two decades removed from the early dot-com boom, a generation of experienced, successful entrepreneurs returning with new startups – and new ideas about how to finance them.

At the same time, investors are also changing, sourcing deals with a data-driven approach that could revolutionize the way seed funding is allocated and deploying capital from overseas sources making their first forays into Silicon Valley. And, like the entrepreneurs they collaborate with every day, investors are becoming more diverse in ethnicity and gender.

These shifting currents fueled a discussion entitled "Early Stage Financing in the New Economy: SOMA to Sand Hill" at the 2016 DLA Piper Global Technology Summit. The panel covered the trends shaping startup financing – and ultimately, startup success.

What follows are the highlights of their conversation. The panelists were:

New sources of capital from Asia.

Yeh: There have been a slew of Asian investors interested in tapping into Silicon Valley companies. We have two major Chinese LPs in our fund. One is a publicly listed private-equity fund that had almost no presence outside of China before 2015. This was an opportunity for them to come and set up a shop here, but also to build relationships with a lot of early-stage US companies and figure out how to globalize their business. The other one is Baidu, which, despite being in the valley for a long time, also wanted to become more established with early-stage companies and build a stronger network in the US.

The best way for seed-stage entrepreneurs to get connected to investors.

Mukherjee: The way a company is introduced to us is a really strong signal of its quality and how knowledgeable that entrepreneur is. Most of the intros come from other seed funds, looking for partners to fill out those early rounds. The very best intro I could receive is from an entrepreneur that I work with and trust. That trumps pretty much everything else, because that means that early-stage entrepreneur has been scrappy enough to get connected with somebody I respect and I know they're building the company the right way.

Raising capital using new tools outside the venture capital system.

Klinger: We ended up doing crowdfunding on Indiegogo because it's a great platform for a company like ours that makes a product – it's a great way to get a product to the early adopters and receive their feedback. So we went to Indiegogo, but it was more about building that community than using it for capital funding. The money you need to get hardware products up and running is much more than you're able to raise through a crowdfunding campaign.   

De Brouwer: We raised our first seed funding where you don't need a track record: in Hollywood. When that seed money ran out, we ran an Indiegogo campaign that broke the record by raising $1.6 million. But it wasn't only the cash – it also validated the marketplace. Suddenly there were people waiting for our product, and then the first VCs came for our A round.

Perseverance still pays off – eventually.

Agratchev: We started raising money in 2008; we install hardware in brick-and-mortar stores so most people didn't want to hear from us because they thought brick-and-mortar was going away. We were fortunate to raise $6 million from a group of individuals outside of Silicon Valley. Even a few years later, when we had good revenue and customers, we still had a hard time. Somewhere along the way it got easier, but I found out that there are certain investors who will just never invest in your business, and there are a lot of VC firms that will waste a lot of your time. We learned to be very upfront in the first meeting about all the potential negative aspects of our product market, and spent time with the investors who were not dissuaded.

How are investors using data to source deals?

Yeh: Through our partnership with AngelList, we have access to a huge data set, mostly around founders' backgrounds and which investors are involved. And because AngelList has a talent site, we can look at data to see which companies are hiring, and who they're hiring. And I'd say 80 percent of our deal flow comes through our platform. But data isn't everything. When it comes to investing decisions, a lot still comes down to trust and the social side.