Table of Contents

• 👉🏻 Introduction

• 💰 Deals done this week

• Today's Deep Dive:

• Want some 121 time with me?

• 🤖 AI in fundraising

• Interesting Things I Read

• Founders’ Guidelines

• About Raise Like a Pro

👉🏻 Introduction

One of the most common terms you hear banded around by both founders and investors is runway. Most people do have a vague understanding of what runway is, but I think they tend to look at it as a single dimension of a mixture of metaphors—where you’re flying the plane as you're building it, and the end of the runway is fast approaching.

If you haven't reached terminal velocity (which is the point at which, if you do not have enough speed to generate lift and take off, you will hit the end of that runway), then the business is dead. But it's so much more nuanced than that, and a lot of founders simply do not think too deeply or examine it in the right light.

So today I'm going to deep dive into what runway means, borrowing from a guide that Sequoia Capital wrote and digging deep into my relatively limited accounting knowledge from my school and university days.

Read the full article below on how founders need to think about runway.

💰 Deals done this week

• Foundation EGI, a Los Altos, CA-based creator of the world's first Engineering General Intelligence (EGI) platform, landed $23M in oversubscribed Series A funding, raising over $30M total. (Read)

• iCapital, a New York, NY-based global fintech company shaping the future of investing, announced it has raised over $820M with the completion of its latest financing round. (Read)

• Airalo, a Lewes, DE-based (with operational base in Singapore) first and largest eSIM provider, received a $220M investment led by new investor, CVC. (Read)

• Varda Space Industries, an El Segundo, CA-based microgravity-enabled life sciences company, scooped up a $187M Series C round, bringing the total capital raised to $329M. (Read)

• MaintainX, a San Francisco, CA-based leading maintenance and asset management platform, secured $150M in Series D funding. (Read)

Today's Deep Dive:

MAIN SECTION

Want some 121 time with me?

🤖 AI in fundraising

Fundraising is undeniably time-intensive and often pulls focus from the critical work of building your business. The good news? The landscape of AI tools is rapidly evolving, offering increasingly sophisticated ways to save precious time – whether you're summarising investor requests, meticulously preparing for meetings, or streamlining the management of due diligence materials.

This week, I've been diving into a few platforms that have truly impressed me with their potential to be game-changers for any fundraising effort:

Signal by NFX is a powerful tool that goes beyond traditional lead sourcing. Unlike more general databases, Signal offers "founder-intent" data, allowing you to identify early-stage startups before they even officially kick off a fundraising round. This "signal-based" approach is especially useful for pinpointing early movers in competitive verticals, giving you a significant head start in identifying promising opportunities.

Clay.com stands out for its incredible flexibility in building automated workflows. It seamlessly integrates multiple data sources like LinkedIn, Crunchbase, and Twitter into a single, enriched profile. For those looking to construct highly custom lead pipelines, especially when layering complex conditions for targeting, Clay offers a level of automation and data enrichment that can truly revolutionize your outreach strategy.

Outreach.io (or similar sophisticated sales engagement platforms) offers a deeper dive into multichannel sequencing. While perhaps more common for sales teams, its advanced capabilities for managing email, LinkedIn, and call sequences, coupled with superior reply tracking, make it invaluable for high-volume investor development. It ensures your outreach is consistent, tracked, and optimized for engagement.

Interesting Things I Read

Raise for Resilience: The New Capital Efficiency Playbook for B2B SaaS

A growing consensus from Forum Ventures, SaaSiest, and others stresses the need for B2B SaaS founders to "raise for resilience." Investors now expect 24–30 months of runway, marking a clear departure from the "growth at all costs" era. This means operating lean, hitting milestones consistently, and realizing that more capital isn’t always better—sustainable, adaptable growth is the new goal. (Read)

AI’s Practical Impact: Transforming B2B Marketing and Sales

In 2025, AI is a core growth driver in B2B marketing and sales, with 89% of leading businesses investing to boost revenue. Key trends include hyper-personalized experiences at scale, predictive analytics to identify top leads, and process automation to unlock team bandwidth. For early-stage founders, embedding AI deeply is no longer optional—it’s foundational. (Read)

Key B2B SaaS Trends for 2026 and Beyond

Beyond AI, emerging trends include Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), low/no-code tools, robust API integrations, and Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) models. SaaS security is now table stakes. Early-stage startups must build secure, integrated, and flexible platforms to meet evolving enterprise needs. (Read)

Founders’ Guidelines

• Demystifying Venture Capital – When and how to raise VC, what investors look for, and why legal strategy and timing matter more than ever.
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• What Makes a Great Biotech VC – A nuanced take on the mindset, patience, and technical depth required to invest successfully in biotech.
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• How VCs Value Your Startup – Free Excel model that shows how investors use the VC Method to forecast returns, dilution, and valuation across rounds.
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• 10 Must-Have Resources for Founders – A curated list of pitch decks, investor databases, cold outreach templates, and financial modeling tools to streamline your startup journey.
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• Top 27 VCs to Call for Your AI Seed Round – A go-to list of investors actively backing AI startups at the seed stage, from Accel to Wing.
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About Raise Like a Pro

Raising a funding round isn’t rocket science. It’s not even brain surgery. But it's incredibly time-consuming, HARD and emotionally challenging.

As a founder, your time is better spent building product, finding product-market fit, signing up customers, and building your team. Yet fundraising demands an enormous amount of your attention and energy.

I've witnessed countless founders struggle with this balance. They get stuck in the cycle of endless pitch meetings, confusing feedback, and the dreaded "no's" that seem to pile up without explanation. Even successful companies like Canva, now valued at $25.5 billion, started with their CEO Melanie Perkins hearing "no" over 100 times before getting that crucial first "yes."

My promise to you

Every piece of advice in this newsletter comes from actual experience: deals I've closed, terms I've negotiated, and strategies I've refined through real-world application.

I'm not here to give you startup platitudes or generic advice. Instead, you'll get practical, actionable tactics that you can implement immediately in your fundraising journey. This is the playbook I use each and every day to help founders all over the world raise money from investors all over the world.

The type of things we have and will continue to cover:

• The actual processes I use to close deals.

• Step-by-step morning routines for effective fundraising.

• Real email templates that get responses.

• Meeting scripts that convert to term sheets.

• Pipeline management techniques that close deals.

• The stuff you really need to know so you don’t get screwed by investors.

The goal? To help you raise money faster, at better valuations, while protecting your interests and your time.

– David

Raise like a Pro is what David Levine does every single day though this business Glenluna Ventures. An exited founder, he raises money each and every day for founders all over the world from investors all over the world.