What Does an "Efficient" Capital Raise look like in 2026?

I had a conversation with a few gentlemen the other day who mentioned to me that they were speaking with another advisory firm, who gave them a 5 YEAR timeline…… to raise $2M.

5 years. To raise $2M.

Companies can be formed, grown, and be sold entirely in that time horizon.

Who even knows where technology is going to be in that time period given the recent run from 2022 to 2025 in terms of LLM development from the AI giants.

But conversations like this shine a light on the state of the early / growth stage market and the problem with most boutiques / advisories - they have not adapted to the technology change to speed the fundraising process up.

Whenever we’re speaking with companies and mention our “90 day sprint” period to surface deals with relevant investment groups, we often get a few eyebrows and some pushback.

“How do you take a process that normally takes 6-12 months and condense it into 90 days?”

Because we cut all of the bloat out of the process.

A few years back we first learned about these massive gaps in the raising process when we were doing sourcing work for a few private equity groups.

We got to see first hand how slow, bloated and inefficient companies were moving when trying to raise or be acquired.

• Founders spending 3-4 months just building their investor list - manually googling funds, scraping LinkedIn, asking for intros, with no systematic targeting methodology

• Companies sending the same generic deck to 200+ investors with zero personalization, then wondering why response rates sit at 2-3%

• Founders burning 15-20 hours per week on "relationship building" coffee chats that never convert to term sheets

• Teams waiting 6-8 weeks for a single warm intro to materialize, only to get passed to a junior associate who isn't the decision-maker

This is where the thesis for what we do for all of our clients at Breakout stem from now.

• Spend 30 days preparing materials, building decks, setting up the entire top of the funnel, building proper targeting

• Spend 90 days building the top of the funnel by aligning and finding funds already deploying into your space and looking for deals like yours + tapping into the network of buyside groups we already know

• Spend the next 30-90 days moving them through DD and into signed term sheets

If you’re currently out in the market and raising a round right now and you don’t have a signed term sheet yet, I believe you should be focusing on getting feedback from investor groups as fast as possible so you can make the changes you need to be making.

There are always going to be tweaks to either the ask, the growth plans, the valuation, or anything else in between when you’re trying to get capital closed.

The more time you take NOT having answers to what needs to be tweaked, you are wasting time, resources, runway, and opportunity cost to deploy into what is going to make your company grow.

That is what an efficient raise looks like in 2026, and is how we are approaching the rounds for all of our clients we’re supporting.

If you have any questions about your round, or your growth plans for 2026, shoot me a reply to this email and I’m happy to help.

If you’re currently raising or planning to be in the next 3 months and you are looking for guaranteed introductions to the right funds, and want all of your materials to be built completely done-for-you, drop me a reply to this message.

2026 is going to be a great year.

Thanks for reading and have a great day.

Ryan Bryden
Breakout Capital Group

P.S. If you’re curious about our proprietary system for how we track investment mandates, give this a look.