Ask HN: How did you fund your early stage hardware startup?

I'm making drones from scratch with a buddy, each one costs ~$2000+ to build and they incur damage from test flights. I hold down a 9-6 software gig to cover our costs, while my mate is on it full time. So far I've put ~$30k into machines, components, and his living costs, and I help him on evenings and weekends. We have good route-to-market plans and momentum with prototypes, but we need more time and cash to mature our flagship model - we crashed one of our latest builds and money is tight.

Seems like we're in a liminal space where we can't advance the RnD enough working part time with my spare change, but we're also far away enough from a mature product to be an easy sell to investors.

We're exploring avenues to raise ~$250k in exchange for ~5% equity. How do you get investors on board with projects where the MVP is months away and requires that kind of capital up front?