Know Your Capital Available Today
2025 - 2026 TODAY - AI or the Highway
Steve Blank tells it like it is: <- READ THE FULL POST)
What's Changed
Venture capital has tilted hard toward Al. In 2025, Al deals represented two-thirds of all the dollars VCs invested. That means if you're not building something Al-related, you're competing for a smaller pool of dollars. Non-Al startups need to answer, "Why can't a better-funded Al-native competitor eat your lunch?"
For software founders, Al has blown up the old math around cost, speed, and headcount. Vibe coding with tools like Claude Code or OpenAl Codex means you can build an MVP (minimal viable product) in days, sometimes hours, not months.
(Which means an MVP is no longer proof of your team's competency [in 2026].)
The constraint used to be: Can we afford to build and ship this? Now the constraint is: Do we know what to test? And can we get in front of users fast enough to learn? Agile is no longer a serial process. Al Agents can run multiple things in parallel for the same or less cost. You can now test multiple versions of the same business at once (or simultaneously be testing different businesses). While you can be simultaneously testing five pricing models, ten messages or twenty UX flows, the "user interface" may no longer be a screen at all. Testing might be to find prompts) to Al Agents) deliver needed outcomes.
The bottleneck is no longer engineering. It's moving up the stack to judgment, customer insight for desired outcomes and distribution.
2023 - 2024: Capital Available - Plenty for Early Stage, Crunch at Series A & Beyond
Plenty of Seed and Pre-Seed capital still available, but more competition for the money than ever, signal to noise (diamonds to coal) ratio not scaling along with the amount of capital, and raising Series A is much harder today in 2025 than it used to be
Frustrated and confused that no VC will take a meeting because you don't have AI anywhere in your pitch deck - although you have what you think is a good business? Read this: "Why Investors Don't Care About Your Business".
Emergence Capital report on 2024 Benchmarks
Redpoint Capital Seed may still be strong, but there's no bounce back at Series A, report
Startup Valuation Data (real-time): https://stack.angellist.com/valuations
Christoph Janz on what it takes to raise funding for SaaS startups in 2023
Alexander Campbell on the 2024 Series A Crunch.
Crunchbase on "The Mixed State Of Startup Funding In 2024" (charts & stats).
SaaS Funding Benchmarks 2024
SaaS Funding Napkin 2023
Above, from Emergence Capital's report Beyond Benchmarks 2024. Below, from Redpoint Capital's Market Overview 2024 report.
