This week on the startup to scaleup journey:
- A great investment proposition isn't enough to get you funded in 2026
Every successful fundraise depends on three things: targeting the right investors, developing a strong investment proposition, and executing an effective campaign. These pillars haven't changed in the sixteen years Duet has been advising early-stage companies. What has changed - dramatically - is their relative importance.
A decade ago, developing the proposition was the hardest part. Understanding what investors wanted (the specific investment criteria) was genuinely difficult. The information wasn't public. Founders who could articulate their opportunity through an investor's lens had a meaningful edge. A reasonable weighting of relative difficulty across our three factors might have therefore been: 30% investors; 40% proposition; 30% campaign.
Today, based on patterns observed across more than seventy client engagements and recent shifts in the market, our assessment shows these weightings have significantly changed:
Investors: 30% → 45%
Proposition: 40% → 10%
Campaign: 30% → 45%
The visible landscape of self-help support that has erupted in recent years - podcasts, newsletters, LinkedIn posts, pitch deck templates etc. - relates almost entirely to the proposition-building pillar, the factor that now matters least as the knowledge gap has reduced. The problem is that founders absorb this content, assume most of the hard work is done, and walk into a process they're unprepared for. The illusion is that fundraising has become easier – but of course we all know that it hasn't.
The key to increasing the probability of funding success now sits heavily within the other two pillars: targeting the right investors and executing an effective campaign. By sharing our understanding of how these have changed we hope founders will be better prepared to conquer the funding challenge of 2026...
This week on the startup to scaleup journey:
- The funding transition that catches most first-time founders off guard
You raised your first round. Angels backed you. A small privately backed fund came in alongside them. These investors moved on personal conviction - they believed in you, they shared your vision, and they made their decisions quickly. The money landed, the cap table took shape, and the business started to move.
Now you're preparing for your next round, this time with a VC. Your ask is bigger, but your story is sharper. You've made clear progress, and you know how to pitch. Why would the outcome be any different this time?
Because the person across the table answers to a completely different set of pressures. They aren't deciding whether they believe in you. They're deciding whether they can build an investment case that will survive the scrutiny of colleagues whose job is to find the holes.
If you don't understand those pressures before you walk in, you will spend months in a process that was never going to close...
This week on the startup to scaleup journey:
- Why brilliant engineers struggle as CEOs - and the identity shift that changes everything
What happens when the person who built the breakthrough technology isn't naturally suited to scale the company around it?
It's a question that haunts every technical founder approaching their first serious funding round. You've solved the hard engineering problem, proven the technology works, and assembled a believing team. But now investors are asking different questions - about market timing, competitive positioning, commercial strategy - and your instinct to dive deeper into technical details isn't serving you anymore.
The problem isn't that you need to learn "business skills." It's deeper: transitioning from technical founder to CEO is a fundamental identity change that requires you to redefine your value proposition entirely.
Most brilliant engineers never make this shift successfully because they approach it as a skill-building exercise rather than an identity evolution...
This week on the startup to scaleup journey:
- The AI compliance deadline you think doesn't apply to you
Do you use predictive analytics in your SaaS product? Route optimisation in your logistics platform? Computer vision in your hardware? If so, you may well be building an AI system under EU law - whether you call yourself an "AI company" or not.
And if you’re a UK founder thinking "EU law doesn't apply to me" - think again. The EU AI Act applies to any company placing AI systems on the EU market, regardless of where that company is incorporated. It is about where your customers are, not where you are based. If you have European users, you are in scope.
Why does this matter? Five months from now, the Act's full compliance requirements for high-risk AI systems are scheduled to become enforceable. Penalties can reach up to €35 million or 7% of global annual turnover. Investors are already factoring this into due diligence. Enterprise buyers are asking about regulatory readiness before signing contracts.
The startups most at risk are not the ones building "AI-first" products. They are the ones who have integrated AI into part of their solution and assumed none of this applies to them.
This week on the startup to scaleup journey:
- Trust is now a technology: why UK founders are best placed to sell it
Most founders look at the war in Iran, rising tariffs and supply chain disruption and see a harder fundraising environment. They're reading the situation backwards.
Yes, geopolitical instability tightens capital, slows enterprise decisions and makes every board more risk averse. That part is real.
But the same forces are doing something else simultaneously - something that most founders are missing at first glance. They are rewriting the procurement priorities of every large government and enterprise on the planet. And the category that has just moved to the top of that list is one where UK startups are unusually well positioned to win.
The category is 'trust' - specifically, the ability to demonstrate that your technology is sovereign, auditable, and not dependent on a foreign government's goodwill to keep working.
That might sound like a compliance issue. It is not. It is rapidly becoming the single most important commercial differentiator in enterprise technology.
Here's why that shift is happening now, why it is structural rather than temporary, and what founders should be doing about it.
This week on the startup to scaleup journey:
- The hidden AI advantage investors are using to evaluate your funding proposition
Your pitch call is in 30 minutes. You've rehearsed the deck, sharpened the narrative, prepared for every question you can think of.
But here's something you probably haven't considered: the investor on the other end of that Zoom has almost certainly already fed your company into an AI-powered evaluation platform before you've even shared your screen.
Does that change how you prepare? It should.
The venture capital industry has undergone a quiet transformation over the past 18 months - one that fundamentally alters the dynamics of every fundraising conversation.
The question for founders isn't whether AI is reshaping how investors evaluate you. It's whether you're walking into the room equipped for the conversation they're now having - or the one you think they're having.
