I’ve Never Seen Anything Like This
The last couple of weeks have been unlike anything I’ve ever seen before.
This fall fundraising season hasn’t just been busy, it’s been unprecedented in terms of both the quality and quality of companies trying to raise capital. But more than that, it feels like over the summer founders adjusted and came to terms with what VCs are looking for right now: unapologetic ambition.
A little over a year ago, I wrote about the changes that were happening at the Seed round as the wave of bifurcation flowed through the venture capital market. In that post, I shared an anecdote about meeting a SaaS founder who was struggling to fundraise,
“I looked up the founder’s company and thought to myself, ‘what a nice, incremental business.’
To be clear, there was nothing wrong with this founder’s business. It was — and is — a perfectly reasonable B2B SaaS company. Yet in comparison to AI companies, with their unprecedented growth trajectories, and deep tech companies, with their imagination-bending potential, it just felt…incremental.”
For most investors, the 12 months since then have been an exercise in contrast: an occasional meeting with a mind-blowing AI or deep tech company, interspersed with dozens and dozens of “incremental businesses” still holding out hope of VC funding. It’s taken some time, but founders have finally gotten the message. In contrast to Q2, the fall has seen a seemingly endless stream of startups whose founding teams have thrown caution to the wind and asked the question, “what if?”
Instead of incremental businesses, early-stage VCs are faced with a pipeline of unbelievably ambitious founders taking big swings. In the past week alone, I met with five different teams of repeat founders raising $20-30M Seed rounds (or preparing to). And every single one was credible.
In fact, there are so many quality companies running fundraising processes right now that even the most well-resourced megafunds are struggling to keep up.
Here are some of the messages I’ve received from VC friends in the past few days:
“This totally slipped through the cracks. Please make an intro.”
“Sorry! Physically hard to keep up these days.”
“That's a hell of a track record and I'd love to dig in, but underwater until November.”
It’s always been the case that VC (probably) isn’t right for you. But at this particular moment, if you aren’t pitching a ridiculously ambitious (but credible) company, it’s honestly not worth your time to try to get the attention of most VCs. For better or worse, the vast majority of VCs right now have no interest in traditional tech businesses (even strong ones), so you’re very likely going to waste precious time that you could spend selling.
And even if you are trying to take a big swing, if you haven’t yet started your fundraising process, I would strongly encourage you to hold off until the new year. Building momentum and managing your fundraising timeline is a key aspect of effective fundraising, and the volume of credible companies that are already actively fundraising will make it nearly impossible to get the attention of enough VCs to drive competitive dynamics. I’m seeing a 2-3 week lag between warm intros going out and first meetings happening, which means that you’re almost guaranteed to have the door slammed on you with the fundraising window closes next month (I'm badly mixing metaphors there, but you get the point 😂).
Spend the rest of 2026 closing new customers and making existing ones happy. And who knows, by the time Q1 comes around, you might not even need to fundraise?