150-200k is also just the employee’s salary, the actual cost to the company is significantly higher, you need to multiply that by something like 1.5 to get the fully loaded cost, people are expensive!
> very confident you'll be able to use them to justify another raise soon
That is indeed how the VC funding game is played. If you don't raise another round, you are dead anyway, so you spend down your seed round to try and justify that following round...