Don’t Let Your Next Raise Decide Your Future
Ugur Sahin and Özlem Türeci founded BioNTech in 2008 with one focus: using mRNA to treat cancer. For twelve years, they built the platform all the way from the underlying mechanism to the manufacturing infrastructure needed to commercialize the therapy.
One day in January 2020, Sahin read a paper in the Lancet about a new virus spreading in Wuhan, China. He immediately saw the potential application of their mRNA platform and redirected the company to treat the coronavirus in parallel.
Pfizer signed a partnership with them in March 2020. By August 2021, BioNTech’s valuation had gone from under $5 billion to over $90 billion. One small change in application made the company worth eighteen times more!
There’s a reason this story matters now more than ever.
Carta’s data shows that Series A deal count in Q1 2025 fell to one-fifth of its Q1 2022 levels. For companies that raised their seed rounds in 2024, Crunchbase’s May 2026 analysis found that only one in six have progressed to Series A or beyond. Even half of all seed deals today are bridge rounds, meaning companies are forced to extend runway toward a milestone they did not reach.
If four out of five funded founders will need a path other than Series A, the question is: what can you do today to equip your startup to survive and thrive even if the winds have turned against you when it’s time to raise?
This week: how building capital optionality into your product strategy from Day 1 changes your position, and what that looks like in practice.
When the Next Round Is No Longer a Given
After they’ve written you the check, your VC has already made an internal assessment of your company well before your next raise. For most funds, if you’re not tracking toward a venture-scale exit, writing you off is a better outcome than supporting a path to profitability that won’t return their capital.
But your view is different. Profitability or a smaller exit puts you in a far better place both financially and personally, than a write-off.
The way to protect that outcome is to build capital strategy into your product strategy from Day 1. Here’s what that looks like in practice.
Say your startup has developed a thermal sensor that uses AI to deliver 10x more precise environmental data.
If you deploy it to do predictive maintenance for large manufacturing plants, you’ll need 12-18 month sales cycles, and expensive implementation teams that cost $2 million a year before you can show any revenue. That will be a tough story to sell when you raise your Series A, even though your growth projections look great.
But you could also deploy it to do fire safety compliance monitoring for commercial buildings. Each building contract is worth only $15,000, but they close fast because compliance is a regulatory requirement and the building manager has authority to sign. With 80 buildings under contract, reachable in 12 months with a two-person sales team, you’ll have more than $1 million in recurring revenue. Breakeven is also very low, achievable with a tiny team. Companies like Carrier and Johnson Controls actively acquire in this category at 3–5× revenue offering you a path to a real exit, and real personal wealth, on a timeline and at a scale a VC fund would never prioritize for you.
Focus is critical. But if you’ve built the ability to pivot quickly from the beginning, you have options a purely VC-dependent startup never reaches.
The Unlock
When you make a product-market decision, you are simultaneously opening or closing off-ramps to other positive financial outcomes than a venture scale exit: faster profitability and a smaller, earlier exit.
Exploring other applications for your product with shorter breakeven times and more potential acquirers creates real options at low cost. The trick is creating them without diluting focus on your primary path to revenue.
Here is how to do this without losing focus on your main path.
First, look for work that serves multiple paths. If the customer conversations, the testing, or the regulatory evidence you need for your primary application also opens a backup path, that’s ideal because you get both for free.
If the backup requires separate product development or a completely different customer base, it’s not a backup. It’s a second company, and you can’t run two companies.
Elise Strobach’s Aeroshield offers a great example of how to do this well. (For a practical, tested approach on how to select the right markets and applications, check out Sharon Tal and Marc Gruber’s Where to Play framework)
Second, for acquisition specifically, you don’t need an “exit strategy”. You just need to be having business conversations with the right companies: potential customers, potential partners, potential co-developers.
The companies that might one day acquire you are the same ones you’d want as customers or partners anyway. Start there, and start early. By the time you need a buyer, they should already know your work. For a real-life example, check out the conversation with Daisy Robinton.
The options stay open because the work is already happening. You’re just being deliberate about who you do it with.
From The Capital Playbook
Find out which capital paths your current choices actually unlock.
Ask yourself three questions, on today’s real numbers.
If you cut to a skeleton crew, can you reach breakeven in six months?
Can you name a company that has actually acquired businesses like yours?
Is your revenue monthly, contracted, and predictable, or does it arrive in milestones and project payments?
Each question maps to a real alternative path: profitability, acquisition, or revenue-based financing. If all three answers are no, that’s exactly what the next two steps in this Playbook are for.
Find a backup application where the work actually overlaps.
Pick one other use for your technology and ask what you’re already doing for your primary application that would also work here — the same customer conversations, the same test results, the same certifications. If nothing carries over, it’s a separate business, not a backup.
Take the thermal sensor example from above: proving the sensor works for factory equipment also proves it works for building safety systems — same hardware, same performance data, same installation process.
The customer conversations are different, but the underlying evidence is the same. That’s what a real backup looks like. Keep looking until you find that overlap.
Identify three companies that could acquire you, and start a business conversation with one this quarter.
Look for companies that have bought businesses like yours before. Then find a real reason to talk to them — as a potential customer, a partner, a co-developer. Don’t mention a sale. By the time you ever need a buyer, that relationship should already be at least a year old.
The One Thing
Pick the next best application for your technology and answer these questions:
What revenue is realistically achievable in six months in this application?
How much capital would you need to reach breakeven?
Which specific company has acquired a startup in this space in the last two years?
What one alternative financing source could apply here, and what would you need to qualify?
The answers tell you how real this option is. If it isn’t there yet, keep digging. You’re already in much better shape than you were before
Build wisely!