The Founders Getting Funded Right Now

I've spent a lot of time lately paying attention to who is actually breaking through at the pre-seed and seed level. Not who should be funded. Not what the pitch circuit or LinkedIn says is happening. Just the hard data on who's getting checks written.

And something has shifted at the earliest stages of venture. What I’m wondering now is: Do the people closest to founders — the accelerators, studios, and hubs — see the shift clearly enough to act on it?

Investors are not betting on ideas anymore. They are betting on signals like early revenue. And technical founders. And capital efficiency. And direct integration with AI — companies where AI is core to how the product works or how the business scales.

What concerns me is not the change itself. Markets and investor appetites shift. That's the game. What concerns me is that a lot of the infrastructure we've built to support early founders — the programs, the curriculum, the way we prepare them for rooms they haven't been in yet — is still calibrated to a world that no longer exists.

The old model prepared founders to pitch a compelling story and a credible team. The new model requires founders to walk in with evidence. Revenue signals. Unit economics. A technical architecture that can scale. A clear answer to the AI question. Most of our programs aren't built to help founders develop those things. We're still running pitch or investor prep.

The venture leaders I respect most have already internalized this. They've stopped asking how to help founders tell a better story. They're focusing instead on helping founders build a more fundable company, and specifically, how to surface the things founders don't know they don't know before they walk into a room full of people who will ask about it.

That's the job right now. Not cheerleading. Not networking. It’s telling founders the truth about what the market (and investors) actually require, with enough specificity that it's useful.

The data below puts some numbers to what I'm seeing.

1. Who's actually getting seed funding — what the numbers show

The sectors attracting the most seed capital right now are AI and generative AI, enterprise ML, defense tech, hard tech and robotics, energy storage, and fintech infrastructure. If a founder isn't operating near one of these spaces, the bar to close is meaningfully higher. That's not a prediction. That's what's happening now.

What investors require has shifted just as much. Ideas alone no longer close seed rounds — even “pre-revenue” startups are now expected to show early traction before a check gets written. Capital efficiency has replaced growth at any cost. Founders who can't show disciplined use of capital are getting passed over. Seed-stage investors now expect $10k–$50k MRR, and the jump to Series A requires $1.5–$2M ARR with 100% year-over-year growth. Most founders I talk to weren’t aware of these numbers yet.

2. How non-U.S. founders are navigating U.S. fundraising — and what most get wrong

Most of the founders in our network aren't building in San Francisco or New York. They're building in Beirut and Baku and Nairobi and Manila. And the ones trying to raise U.S. capital keep running into the same walls. Research tracking 500+ founders puts the gap at 40% longer to close than their U.S. counterparts. What I see in our network matches that exactly.

What they get right: They're scrappier, more capital efficient, and often further along on revenue before they ever talk to an investor. They have to be. What trips them up is more structural in nature.

They incorporate in Delaware too late or too cheaply, and the problems surface mid-raise. They grind cold outreach that converts below 2% without realizing that U.S. fundraising runs almost entirely on warm introductions — and that the fastest way to build those as an outsider is through an accelerator, not a LinkedIn connection request. That's the part most founders figure out two years too late.

The ones who figure it out early treat accelerator acceptance less as a program and more as a network key. Same with the visa — the O-1A is more accessible than most founders realize, and accelerator acceptance can qualify you for it. The structural stuff is solvable. Unfortunately, most founders just solve it too late.

The venture-capital populist — The Atlantic

George Packer just published a careful, reported look at how David Sacks and the new tech right went full MAGA and captured Washington. It's not a hit piece. It's about power, proximity, and how lucrative the alignment between Silicon Valley's investor class and the Trump administration has been for both sides. Worth your time regardless of where you sit politically. Venture capital now operates in a fundamentally different league than it did five years ago, and this piece explains a lot of why.

Cooking is a better creative outlet than most of us admit

Psychology Today ran a piece this spring on the psychological benefits of cooking that I keep returning to. The argument: Cooking occupies a unique space between art and utility. It gives you a task with a clear beginning, middle, and end. A real experience of completion that generalizes into broader confidence. The creativity involved is a genuine outlet for emotional processing that most people, especially men, never give themselves permission to take seriously. Cooking is one of the few things that fully pulls me out of my head.

Which brings me to the best dish I've ever made

David Chang's Momofuku Bo Ssam. It's bone-in pork butt, dry-cured overnight in salt and sugar, slow-roasted for six hours, then finished with a brown sugar crust that caramelizes into something almost burnt and incredible. It costs $250 at his NYC restaurant. You can make it at home for a fraction of that. 

Thanks for reading. Hit reply if something lands.

Pat

President & CEO, Global Venture Network

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