I met Joe (Beiqiao) Hu at Toronto Tech Week. When I asked him what had brought him there, I braced for the usual founder answer, some polished version of “I built an app that.” Instead he said:

It stopped me. Not only the thought, but the word. Serendipity is a word I picked up only after 10 years of living and studying in Canada.

Joe Hu, Beiqiao Hu, still remembers the trick he used in primary school. When the English teacher asked the class to read vocabulary aloud, he did not know how. So he asked the classmate next to him to write the Chinese pronunciation under each English word, and he read the Chinese instead. He calls what he had back then “deaf and mute” English: he could squint at a word on a page, but he could not hear it and he could not say it.

That kid grew up to score 106 out of 150 on China’s national college entrance English exam, 469 on CET-4, and 426 on CET-6, and then quietly decided he was simply not a language person. When he thought about studying abroad as an undergraduate, the moment he pictured his English level, he gave up on the idea. He tried to improve after graduation. He says he failed every single time.

Today he lives in Ottawa, has spoken at more than 20 events around Canada, runs a company called Just Joe Technologies, and ships an AI product that tens of thousands of people use to practice speaking English.

Moving to an English-speaking country did not do that for him, and he is blunt about it. Living abroad, on its own, changed nothing. What changed things was building the tool he wished existed, then aiming it squarely at himself, every day. Serendipity, maybe. But the kind you have to build with your own hands.

Starting over, one word at a time

The restart came in 2020, at home during COVID. Joe went back to the foundations, vocabulary one word at a time, which felt faintly ridiculous for a grown man who read English on Twitter every morning and assumed he was basically fine. Then he sat a reading mock in May 2021 and scored 5.5. It took him 3 hours. Reading and listening came back with effort. Speaking and writing were a different category of difficulty. He had a full-time job, so he hired one-on-one tutors and bought himself some technique. In March 2022 he scored a 6.5 on IELTS, the number he had set as a private border: clear it or stay home. He still calls it one of the best days of his life.

Speaking would not let go of him, though. He got a school offer in 2023 and spent a good while quietly unconvinced he belonged. What finally loosened that doubt was not an exam. It was a trip to New Zealand, where eleven native speakers, one after another, told him his English was good. One American teacher said it was better than that of most Chinese speakers she had met. Something settled in him: his English was already enough for a real conversation. He filed his study permit.

“Living abroad didn’t magically improve my English. Dedicated practice did.”

The idea that arrived in the shower

Joe was already the type who builds his way out of a problem. He had wired up custom GPTs to grade his own IELTS reading and writing. Speaking, the part he actually needed, had nothing good behind it. Then in November 2023 OpenAI gave ChatGPT a voice, and Joe had the idea in the shower that would eat the next two years of his life: simulate the entire speaking exam, examiner and all.

He built the IELTS Speaking Simulator GPT that December and open-sourced it. His read on why it worked is sharper than it first sounds. A speaking exam ships with a rubric, which means the AI’s output has something concrete to be measured against, which makes the whole task an unusually clean fit for the technology.

“Even hallucination is a feature, not a bug,” he says, and in this one corner of the world he is correct: an examiner that improvises fresh questions is simply doing its job. He used it daily, shipped a V3, posted it to RedNote, and watched it go viral. Over time roughly 50,000 learners ran on it.

He also caught the flaw that would quietly become his company’s entire thesis. After each session he copied the feedback into Notion, then never opened it again. Same topics, same mistakes, on a loop.

The problem, he worked out later, was never how much he practiced. It was how well.

Knowing when to quit, and when to wait

In August 2024 Joe landed in Canada for a master’s, and got a small pleasant surprise at the door: a classmate already knew his simulator GPT. Joe wanted to turn it into a real product and did not believe he had it in him, so he set himself a low bar, refresh the question bank each season and call that maintenance.

Then the model moved. OpenAI shipped a real-time voice API late in 2024, and Joe built a demo at an AGI Venture Canada hackathon.

It worked, and it was expensive: a two-minute conversation cost more than $2. Worse, every time he fixed one bug, three new ones appeared, which is the specific suffering of building software while leaning on AI to write the parts you do not fully understand. So he stopped. On purpose. He decided to wait for better models rather than ship something he was afraid to touch.

Most founders would file that under failure. Joe filed it under timing, and timing turned out to be the skill that separated this attempt from the last one.

A trip to the Bay Area in mid-2025 handed him the line he kept repeating to himself: build something that belongs to yourself.

By then he had spent the year crossing from non-technical to genuinely shipping front-end work, first with Cursor, then with Claude Code. He flew home to Ottawa with a plan and a stack of free AI credits.

Mark, and the two-minute report that became a company

The center of this story is not a model release. It is a man named Mark. Non-native English speaker who sounds native, former army officer, economist by trade, onetime United Nations employee, and, in his own words, a full-time grandpa and part-time citizen in action. They met before a networking event in Joe’s first month in Canada. When Mark heard that Joe wanted to get better at English, he started sending him voice messages and handed him a deceptively small assignment: report your day, out loud, in no more than two minutes.

Joe did it inconsistently at first. Last summer he committed, sending Mark a report every day and getting feedback every day in return. Mark even gave the habit a name to make it stick: Reporter Joe Speaking.

Joe often could not feel his own progress, but Mark and a mentor could see it, and more than any band score, he noticed he could now describe his own life without flinching. This, far more than the exam, is why the product exists. He wanted somewhere to keep his daily reports and get them graded. “If I hadn’t met Mark, I might not have built this,” he says. “Thank you, Mark.”

The pressure that turned a habit into a company was bureaucratic. Joe needed a CLB 9 to chase permanent residency after graduation, so he went back to practicing, even treating networking events mainly as speaking reps rather than for the networking. His score would not move off roughly 6.5. He got critical of the AI, went back and read the feedback properly, and conceded it was right.

The weak link was him. He did not have the patience to run the same topic twice, or the stomach to listen back to his own voice. That admission became the product’s spine: feedback and repetition over an endless feed of fresh questions.

80 days to a working product

He folded the whole thing into his master’s research under professor Tony Bailetti at Carleton, and paired it with a scoping review of the actual learning science, mechanisms with names like interleaved practice and elicited feedback.

One project, several problems solved at once. He also made a clear-eyed case for why he was the right person to build it: an AI tinkerer who owned the exact pain and understood it from the inside.

He started building in mid-November 2025 on free Claude Code credits. When Opus 4.5 launched, it moved what he believed was possible, and he could suddenly see the thing shipping. When the free credits ran out he paid for a $200 subscription and has zero regret about it: without it, he says flatly, the product would not exist. The voice integration nearly broke him. He budgeted one week to wire up Gemini and spent five. His first 3 paying customers hit a brutal first impression, the connection dropping after ten minutes, and he made stability the only thing that mattered until it held.

What came out the other side is Joe Speaking: a real-time AI examiner for IELTS and CELPIP that hands you a band estimate, a transcript, a replay, and section-by-section feedback for about a dollar a session, against the $25 to $60 an hour a human tutor charges.

Underneath the exam mode sits the habit Mark taught him, recording your day, reviewing it, running the same topic again, comparing the takes. It was enough of a business to put his name on real paperwork. He registered Just Joe Technologies, tagline included: Building What Was Impossible Yesterday.

The number he had chased for years

In May, after months of rehearsing on software he had written himself, Joe sat the test and scored CLB 9 on his first attempt, the number he had carried around for years. He refuses to treat it as a finish line. The real target, he will tell you, lives outside any rubric: saying what he means, clearly and without fear, so people understand both his point and who he is.

That is the part worth sitting with. He still says his English is far from great and his app is firmly in alpha. He is not selling a tidy before-and-after. He is selling a method, and he happens to be its first and most honest test case.

What builders can learn from Joe

Be the market, not its observer 

Joe never surveyed learners. He was the learner, which is exactly why he could feel it when the product was lying to him. That kind of judgment cannot be outsourced; it comes from needing the thing yourself.

Run on your own software

He practiced on Joe Speaking daily and earned his score with it. Using your product as its harshest user surfaces the truth faster than any round of customer interviews.

Ship the rough version in public

The open-sourced GPT was raw, and it still built him an audience of tens of thousands who were already waiting when the real app arrived. Those RedNote likes were also the fuel that kept him going on the hard nights.

Treat quitting as a tool

He walked away from the 2024 build on purpose, because the models were not ready, then moved the moment they were. Knowing when to wait is not the opposite of ambition.

Aim past the score

The line he borrowed from Mark runs under everything: it is not your band score that matters, it is how clearly you can say what you think and how confident you are while you say it.

Sell the loop, not the feature

His own bad habit, practicing without ever reviewing, told him where the value was hiding. He bet the company on repetition and feedback rather than on streaks and badges.

About the Author

Lidia Vijga

Lidia Vijga is a content engineer focused on building in-house growth engines and training AI agents that help companies scale content and dominate brand visibility across traditional and AI search. She is also co-founder of DeckLinks, bringing firsthand founder experience in building and scaling technology products.

The post Joe Hu Couldn’t Beat the IELTS Test, So He Built His Own Examiner appeared first on BYVI.

If you are planning a startup journey or already in the middle of one it’s really important to take a step back and think through your personal finances. Startup life can be unpredictable, and not having your finances in order can add a lot of unnecessary stress and affect not just your personal life but also to how you run your company. Having a solid financial plan gives you the peace of mind to focus on building and growing your startup. This is the reason I built Planwell, to help people plan their finances for major life decisions.

Here is the definitive guide for the major financial decisions every founder should think about before and during the early startup phase.

Decide how long you will commit to your startup

It is wise to give yourself a certain period of time to work on your startup and evaluate whether it will work out. Set clear milestones that you need to achieve within a certain period of time.

This time-bound approach creates focus and prevents the startup from becoming a never-ending project. It also helps you plan your finances better.

How does your stage of life affect this decision?

Your financial strategy will almost certainly differ depending on where you are in life. Early career founders often have lower fixed costs and may still be on a parent’s health insurance plan, which makes a shorter runway more manageable. Founders with families face higher fixed costs such as childcare, schooling and family health insurance. However, they may also have a higher level of savings accumulated and potentially a partner whose income or insurance provides a buffer. Take stock of your full picture and try to maintain a higher personal reserve before committing fully. 

Analyze your cash flow and budget requirements

Before leaving your salaried job, analyze your personal cash flow and understand how much you spend every month. In particular, try to figure out the discretionary expenses that you could cut while you are working on the startup. 

What can you do to prepare financially while still in a W2 role?

If you have the leeway, try to keep your fixed costs low. If you have the dream of doing a startup down the line, do not buy the most expensive home and do not max out your lifestyle, even if you can afford it. The flexibility you preserve now becomes the runway you have later.

What are your health insurance options as a founder?

Unless you have a spouse or parent whose health insurance you can rely on, you need to figure out health insurance options and budget for them before you make the leap. You can purchase coverage through the Individual Marketplace via the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Typical monthly premiums vary by age and state:

Early-stage teams sometimes use services like Take Command Health to navigate options.

Estimate whether you have funds to cover your budget

How many months or years of runway do you have to cover your budget? Does this match the period of time you gave yourself to work on your startup and take it to the next level?

This calculation determines whether you can bootstrap or whether you need other income sources.

How can you model your personal financial runway before quitting your job?

Start with the calculation above, but keep in mind that most founders underestimate costs like healthcare, quarterly taxes and irregular expenses.

A tool like Planwell’s Career Break Planner  lets you input your exact income, expenses, assets and goals and stress-test your runway under different spending scenarios. You can also model how a major decision like buying a home changes how long your savings will last. Unlike a generic AI tool like ChatGPT, Planwell uses its own financial models and runs your exact numbers, so the output is specific to your situation rather than a general answer that could apply to anyone.

Build a founder-sized emergency fund

The standard advice, three to six months of expenses in reserve, was written for people with stable salaries. As a founder, aim for at least twelve months of personal expenses in liquid savings. Keep this separate from whatever you have allocated to the business. This will help ensure that an unexpected expense or a delayed funding round does not force a bad business decision.

If You Don’t Have Enough Savings, Consider Your Options

Review legal and tax obligations

When you set up your startup in the US, you have to make sure to file Form 83(b) which lets you pay taxes upfront on the restricted stocks at the value at grant rather than when the stock vests. This is because stocks appreciate upon vesting and you will have to pay ordinary income tax upon vesting. The form 83(b) has to be filed within 30 days of the grant and this is absolute. Missing filing the 83(b) within this 30-day period is usually irreversible and can lead to massive unexpected tax bills. Set a calendar reminder the day you sign your founding documents.

What are your retirement savings options as a self-employed founder?

As much as possible, do not deplete your retirement funds while building your startup. As a self-employed founder you have access to several tax-advantaged vehicles:

Understand your tax position as a self-employed founder

Your tax obligations depend on how your business is structured and how you pay yourself. If you’re operating as a sole proprietor, LLC, or partnership, taxes typically aren’t withheld automatically, and you may need to make quarterly estimated tax payments. Depending on your structure, you may also owe self-employment tax. By contrast, founders of C-Corporations who pay themselves a salary generally receive a W-2, with payroll taxes withheld just like any other employee. As a starting point, many founders set aside 25–35% of income for taxes, although the right amount depends on your income level and state of residence. Before choosing an entity structure, speak with a CPA who works with startups. The decision can have long-term implications for taxes, fundraising, and equity compensation.

Separate personal and company finances

It is wise to get a separate bank account for the business and not mix your personal and professional accounts. Even if you are the one funding the business, having a separate account helps you track how much you are actually spending on the business.

Think Carefully About Bootstrapping

Bootstrapping can be a great way to maintain ownership, but it also concentrates risk. Avoid putting all your personal assets into the company. Instead, allocate a specific budget for bootstrapping. 

Tie that budget to milestones, such as:

Consider part-time or side gig income

Even if you go full-time, you may want to consider part time or contract work on the side if finances are a crunch. You can consider consulting, contract work or freelance projects. This income can extend your personal runway while you are working on your startup.

Plan your founder salary if you have raised funding

Once you have raised funding, the question of how to pay yourself becomes more structured. Here is what founders typically do.

When should you start paying yourself?

Most founders begin paying themselves once the company raises funding or the business generates consistent revenue. The goal is not to match a big tech salary but to cover living expenses so you can focus fully on the company.

How much should you pay yourself?

Founder salaries typically depend on the funding stage and location. Many early-stage founders pay themselves enough to cover basic living expenses, often in the range of $70k to $120k in expensive cities, though this varies widely.

Investors generally expect founders to live comfortably but not extravagantly. Investors do not want you to be anxious and distracted due to money troubles, and encourage founders to take a decent salary that helps support their living expenses but otherwise want you to deploy all your resources into growing the business.

Think about equity as part of your personal finances

Your equity stake may represent the majority of your theoretical net worth on paper. It is also completely illiquid and might end up being worth nothing. Planwell’s lifetime financial projection shows your actual net worth at every stage of life, which is a useful reality check when equity makes your paper wealth look larger than your actual financial position. Plan your personal finances as if equity does not exist: maintain your savings, keep contributing to retirement, manage your fixed costs, and treat equity as optionality rather than income.

Protect your personal credit

Your credit score matters more as a founder than it ever did as an employee. Business credit lines and financing can touch it. Keep personal and business spending cleanly separated, pay personal obligations on time even when business finances are tight, and avoid personal guarantees until you fully understand what you are signing.

Plan around major life events

Buying a home, having a child, supporting an aging parent. These do not pause because you are building a company, and each one can materially change your personal runway overnight. Founders make the mistake of treating these as separate from their startup finances whereas they are deeply connected. Planwell is built for exactly this: you can run what-if scenarios to see how a single major decision like taking on a mortgage ripples through your cash flow, retirement timeline and other goals simultaneously, before you commit.

What to do if your startup fails financially

Startup failure is common and it is not something to be anxious about, but something to plan for financially. Often the startup experience can be a good value add to your resume and show that you have the drive and resourcefulness to handle high levels of ambiguity. So use your startup experiences and skills to obtain a leadership role at a company that values these skills.

In the process of building your startup, you may have done a lot of networking and met smart people. You can reach out to them and see if they can hire you or recommend you for a role. Many VC firms hire ex-founders and operators so do not forget to keep in touch with your VC friends.

The bottom line

Founders who navigate personal finances well tend to share one habit: they treat their own money with the same rigour they bring to their business. They know their runway, they separate their accounts, they plan for the costs that do not show up until they do.

The startup bet is already a bold one. The goal is to make sure your personal finances are stable enough that when hard decisions come, and they will, you are making them with a clear head. If you want to model your own situation, Planwell lets you input your exact income, expenses, assets and goals and get a personalized plan in minutes, without the generic advice that does not account for how founders actually live.

About the Author

Arundhati Sampath is the founder of Planwell, a financial planning tool designed to help people model life transitions such as startup journeys, career breaks, and early retirement.

The post How to Plan Personal Finances as a Startup Founder appeared first on BYVI.

From June 15–18, the 2026 WBENC National Conference brings thousands of incredible women entrepreneurs together with the corporate leaders who want to work with them. Somewhere in those aisles is your next client, your next supplier or the collaborator who will spark your next big idea.

With so much talent in one place, the hard part is simply finding them before the conference ends. So for everyone heading to Salt Lake City this year, I did the homework. Make sure to meet these remarkable women and learn about their companies.

Paden Sickles, Founder & CEO at SickFit

Paden Sickles is the founder and CEO of SickFit. A former Army Engineer Officer, she was among the first women to train and lead enlisted female combat engineers before launching the brand. She’s also a founding partner of the Global Flag Football League and is completing her doctorate, redefining what’s possible for women- and veteran-owned businesses.

About SickFit   Booth 731

SickFit makes performance compression socks for the people on their feet all day – nurses, warehouse crews, line cooks, tradespeople. Veteran- and woman-owned, WBE-certified, and built on three patents, SickFit engineers support that holds up shift after shift.

Pamela A. Kan, CEO & Owner at Bishop-Wisecarver

Pamela A. Kan is the CEO and Owner of Bishop-Wisecarver. A second-generation leader, she joined the family company in 1991, became president in 1999, and principal shareholder in 2009. She’s since led multiple acquisitions, transforming Bishop-Wisecarver into a complete mechatronics company, and champions STEM education along the way.

About Bishop-Wisecarver Booth 1414

Bishop-Wisecarver, founded in 1950, is a global leader in linear and rotary motion solutions engineered for the harshest environments. With 75 years of expertise, it now delivers turnkey automation, custom mechatronics, controls, and software as a complete motion-solutions partner.

Molly Huyck, Amie Konwinski & Janessa Nations – The Team at AeQuitas Invest

About AeQuitas Invest (AQi)  Booth 223

AeQuitas Invest (AQi) is an SEC-registered, FINRA-member funding portal, the only U.S. portal founded by women, owned by women, and built exclusively for women-owned companies. It lets women-led businesses raise capital directly from investors through Regulation Crowdfunding on founder-friendly terms, while keeping control of the company they built.

Read my deep dive on AeQuitas Invest here.

Shannon “Shãn” Sutherland, CEO at Simple Impact

Shannon Sutherland is the CEO & Founder of Simple Impact. A Certified Wealth Advisor and Retirement Counselor, she’s dedicated to helping organizations build better retirement plans. She brings clarity and accountability to one of the most important and most overlooked benefits a company can offer.

About Simple Impact   Booth 337

Simple Impact advises, establishes, converts, and services retirement plans for businesses of all sizes. The firm helps employers give their teams stronger retirement outcomes with expert, fiduciary-grade guidance.

Glenda Thomas – CEO of Electra Grid Solutions

Glenda Thomas is the CEO and President of Electra Grid Solutions. Glenda leads with a servant’s heart, describing her mission as keeping people connected and her team empowered to be their best every day. Active with groups from the American Association of Blacks in Energy to WBEC South, she’s known to her team simply as “The Light.”

About Electra Grid Solutions Booth 111

Electra Grid Solutions is a minority and women-owned infrastructure contractor powering the electric utility industry with safe, high-quality construction and maintenance. The team helps utilities strengthen grid reliability and modernize aging infrastructure, keeping communities connected when it matters most.

Letisha Randle – CEO at PRH Group

Letisha Randle is the CEO and co-owner of PRH Group. She drives the company’s growth through an unwavering focus on safety, quality, and customer satisfaction, steering PRH into the green-energy future while keeping reliability at its core.

About PRH Group Booth 308

PRH Group, founded in 2017 and headquartered in Saginaw, Michigan, is an electrical construction company specializing in overhead distribution, transmission lines, substations, and storm restoration. When the lights go out in the toughest conditions, PRH is built to bring them back.

Louise Lascik – CEO at Travel Leaders

Louise Lascik is the CEO of Travel Leaders. She’s spent nearly 40 years in business travel, routinely trimming clients’ travel spend by 20%. Off the clock she teaches yoga to people with spinal cord injuries, volunteers with seniors, and is determined to one day shred electric guitar around a campfire.

About Travel Leaders Booth 104

Travel Leaders is a WBENC-certified firm that takes the headache out of corporate travel – cutting costs, lifting traveler satisfaction, and integrating expense management. Their promise is simple: help clients travel smart and achieve more.

Gloria Bohan – CEO of Omega World Travel

Gloria Bohan is the founder and CEO of Omega World Travel. She built Omega from a single agency in 1972 into one of the nation’s largest woman-owned businesses — a true pioneer for women in travel. At the conference you’ll meet Proposals Manager Pam Welliver, ready to map out the right solution for your organization.

About Omega World Travel Booth 226

Omega World Travel is a woman-owned global travel management company with more than 54 years of experience in business travel, meetings, events, and group bookings. Blending advanced technology with personal service, Omega delivers cost savings, traveler support, and duty-of-care expertise worldwide.

Kelly Kolar-Eyman – President & Founder at Kolar Design

Kelly Kolar-Eyman is the President and Founder of Kolar Design. She’s spent 30+ years at the intersection of brand, space, and human experience, and now brings AI into the mix through her platform KXInnovations. An adjunct professor and First Vice-Chair of the WBENC National Forum, she believes design has the power to inspire, heal, and change lives.

About Kolar Design   Booth 601

Kolar Design transforms spaces with brand-led strategy that connects people, process, and place. Using data-driven insight, the award-winning firm helps Fortune 500s, civic institutions, and healthcare systems optimize real estate through human-centered experience.

Tracey Grace – President & CEO at IBEX IT Business Experts

Tracey Grace is the President and CEO of IBEX IT Business Experts. She left corporate America to build IBEX from the ground up, leading projects for NASA, the CDC, and Fortune 500s along the way. A connector and lifelong learner, she believes strong relationships and smart strategy are still the most powerful competitive advantages.

About IBEX IT Business Experts Booth 1111

IBEX IT Business Experts is the creator of Nectar IQ, an intelligent supplier-orchestration platform that helps enterprises centralize supplier data, streamline engagement, and make smarter decisions. From onboarding to spend analytics, IBEX turns supplier management into a competitive edge.

Maryann Pagano – CEO & Co-Founder at BlackHawk Data

Maryann Pagano is the CEO and co-founder of BlackHawk Data. She brings 20+ years of leadership to the company, which she’s grown to 55+ employees and multiple industry awards since founding it in 2018. A WPO Fast 50 and EY Winning Women honoree, she’s passionate about mentoring and advancing women in technology.

About BlackHawk Data   Booth 1110

BlackHawk Data is a fast-growing, woman-owned technology solutions provider that cuts through the complexity of modern IT to deliver real client outcomes. Since 2018 it has scaled into a nationally recognized firm earning honors like the CRN Top 500 and Fast Growth 150.

Valerie Mayén – Owner & Designer at Yellowcake Shop

Valerie Mayén is the owner and designer of Yellowcake Shop. A Project Runway alum and ethical-fashion advocate, she designs clothing meant to make women feel powerful and like their favorite selves. Her new Valerie Mayén Collection leans into bolder silhouettes and luxe fabrics – and she’d truly love to meet you.

About Yellowcake Shop   Find them on the show floor – Retail

Yellowcake Shop is a Latina-owned, women-led fashion brand from Cleveland making ethically produced, versatile staples for the everyday professional woman. Clean, classic, and built to last, the line is designed to simplify your wardrobe — and your mornings.

Ebony Smith – President at Ebenum Equation

Ebony Smith is the President of Ebenum Equation. She’s spent 15+ years helping leaders unlock clarity, connection, and courageous action — now at the intersection of human leadership and AI. An ICF Master Certified Coach and 2026 WBENC Host Committee member, she helps leaders make faster, more human-centered decisions in a fast-moving world.

About Ebenum Equation   Host Committee

Ebenum Equation helps organizations strengthen leadership pipelines and navigate AI-driven transformation through executive coaching, strategy, and program design. Leaders trust the firm to turn complex concepts into scalable programs across finance, technology, and retail.

Renée Conlee – COO & Managing Partner at EventBuilder

Renée Conlee is the COO and Managing Partner of EventBuilder. She was in the virtual-events world before most people had heard the word “webinar,” joining the company in 2006 and rising to COO in 2016. For clients, she’s the guarantee that the team behind their events is run by a hands-on, seasoned event professional.

About EventBuilder Booth 1027

EventBuilder plans, manages, and produces virtual, hybrid, and in-person events for enterprise teams using proprietary software built alongside Microsoft Teams. The company has delivered over 75,000 events for Microsoft alone — from training programs to global summits.

Tammy Cohen, Founder & Chief Visionary Officer at InfoMart

Tammy Cohen is the Founder and Chief Visionary Officer of InfoMart. Known as the “Queen of Screen,” she’s a three-decade screening pioneer named among Atlanta’s Top 20 Women-Owned Firms and a Stevie “Maverick of the Year.” She’s now building a digital Career Wallet to reinvent how people manage their professional credentials.

About InfoMart   Booth 922

InfoMart is one of the top 10 background screening and identity companies in the industry, giving businesses the insights they need to hire compliantly and confidently. With 35+ years of expertise and industry-leading turnaround times, it’s a trusted partner in risk mitigation.

Jessica Walther, CEO & Co-Founder at Itivate

Jessica Walther is the CEO and co-founder of Itivate. After leading procurement and transformation inside Fortune 50 environments, she saw how often growing companies scale into chaos. Today she helps founders grow profitably while helping corporations build higher-performing supplier ecosystems.

About Itivate Booth 437

Itivate is the only supplier accelerator led by former Fortune 50 buyers and operators, giving founders insider access to the systems they need to scale. Through its Align My Company scaling system, it helps businesses grow without founder overload – while strengthening corporate supply bases.

Joanne Jones, Business Development Manager at KERAMIDA

Joanne Jones is the Business Development Manager at KERAMIDA. A professional connector, she works at the intersection of strategy, relationships, and environmental impact. She’s energized by partnerships that deliver both revenue and real sustainability outcomes. Stop by if you’re building something with the planet in mind.

About KERAMIDA Booth 1424

KERAMIDA, founded in 1988, is a global sustainability, EHS, and engineering advisor trusted by industry, power, oil & gas, and financial institutions. For nearly four decades the WBENC-certified firm has guided corporate giants toward resilience and stewardship.

Kellé Thorpe, Founder & CEO at Kommas with Kellé

Kellé Thorpe is the Founder and CEO of Kommas with Kellé. She guides founders past the point where revenue grows but profit, cash flow, and wealth don’t keep pace. She gives CEOs the visibility and accountability to scale intentionally — turning growth into lasting freedom and wealth.

About Kommas with Kellé   Booth 831

Kommas with Kellé is a strategic CFO advisory firm that helps high-achieving women CEOs turn revenue into real, sustainable wealth. Through fractional CFO services and its forward-looking Financial Roadmap, the firm aligns business performance with personal financial goals.

Denise Merritt, CEO & Founder at Merritt Business Solutions

Denise Merritt is the CEO and Founder of Merritt Business Solutions. With 35+ years in HR and benefits, she takes a consultative, educational approach to solving clients’ toughest people challenges. Her mission is pointed: help minority-owned businesses achieve economic equality — and always do the right thing.

About Merritt Business Solutions   Booth 924

Merritt Business Solutions is a concierge HR outsourcing firm that connects businesses with exactly the benefits, PEO, payroll, and compliance solutions they need. From compensation analysis to complex audits — even global Employer of Record — MBS handles the sourcing so clients can focus on their mission.

Allison Maslan, CEO & Founder at Pinnacle Global Network

Allison Maslan is the CEO and Founder of Pinnacle Global Network. She built Pinnacle to help founders step out of the day-to-day and into a freer, more meaningful life. Her mentors have “been there and done it,” guiding leaders to shave years off the path to a self-sustaining company.

About Pinnacle Global Network   Booth 609

Pinnacle Global Network gives 7-to-9-figure founders direct access to seasoned CEO mentors, signature strategies from its SCALEit Method, and a worldwide peer network built for momentum. The main goal: build team-managed companies that can scale without the founder.

Cate Heaman, CEO at Prelude Solutions

Cate Heaman is the CEO of Prelude Solutions. She leads a firm that doesn’t sell technology – it helps organizations recover real, measurable dollars and reinvest them in growth. Through the Prelude Cares Network, a portion of revenue flows back to nonprofits driving workforce development and economic mobility.

About Prelude Solutions   Booth 930

Prelude Solutions helps organizations reclaim capital hidden in one of their most overlooked expenses: technology. Through its vendor-agnostic Prelude Process, the firm renegotiates telecom, cloud, mobility, and data services for an average 33% verified savings — on a success-based model where clients pay only for results.

Tatiana Dominguez, Founder & Chief Innovation Officer at Spark Hive

Tatiana Dominguez is the Founder and Fractional Chief Innovation Officer of Spark Hive. A creative strategist and systems thinker, she helps founders turn what they feel into something they can build. She founded Spark Hive on a simple belief: clarity is a founder’s most powerful tool, and no one should have to build alone.

About Spark Hive Booth 733

Spark Hive is a strategic innovation and AI studio for visionary founders, turning bold ideas into scalable systems and custom AI tools. From brainstorming labs to fractional innovation leadership, it bridges the gap between messy brilliance and repeatable action.

Janeen Zook, President & CEO at Trattativa

Janeen Zook is the President and CEO of Trattativa. She leads a team with more than 100 years of combined hospitality experience, serving as a seamless extension of her clients’ organizations. She and her team execute intentionally and serve passionately so clients can be fully present at their own events.

About Trattativa Booth 1011

Trattativa is a full-service event management company based in Las Vegas, bringing strategic vision (not just party planning) to meetings, conferences, and corporate events. Since 2007 it has built a reputation for precision, reliability, and unforgettable experiences.

Louise Leduc Kennedy – Founding Attorney at West Hill Technology Counsel

Louise Leduc Kennedy is the Founding Attorney of West Hill Technology Counsel. A tech-savvy legal strategist with two decades of experience, she guides everyone from startups to Fortune 100s through AI, data privacy, M&A, and software commercialization. She founded West Hill to redefine the modern law firm, integrating work, family, and community into its definition of success.

About West Hill Technology Counsel   Booth 910

West Hill Technology Counsel is a women-led law firm helping IP-focused technology businesses grow, manage risk, and prepare for successful exits. Practicing law differently from day one, the firm delivers proactive, practical advice – solving problems before they arise.

Michele Downie – Marketing Manager at American Crane & Equipment Corporation

Michele Downie is the Marketing Manager at American Crane & Equipment Corporation. She blends strategy, storytelling, and creativity to shape the brand, drawing on 25+ years in design, advertising, and marketing. She’s the one making sure this 50-year legacy of craftsmanship gets the spotlight it deserves.

About American Crane & Equipment Corporation Booth 1319

American Crane & Equipment Corporation has led in overhead crane systems, hoists, and material-handling innovation for over 50 years. Built on resilience and precision, the company lives by one principle: Always Lift. Never Quit.

Jill Gaynor, CEO at Premier Packaging

Jill Gaynor is the CEO of Premier Packaging. She became CEO and majority shareholder in 2024, leading one of the largest woman-owned and managed businesses in the country. She’s steering a three-decade legacy into its next chapter of growth across North America.

About Premier Packaging Booth 427

Premier Packaging has spent over 30 years as a manufacturer, distributor, designer, and problem-solver across all things packaging. Now female owned and operated, the company became a WBENC-Certified WBE in 2025.

Anita MacKenzie, Founder at C-West Custom Fixtures

Anita MacKenzie is the Founder and Owner of C-West Custom Fixtures. She’s spent decades turning concepts into well-built, functional spaces that support her clients’ brands. Her focus has never wavered: quality, reliability, and strong relationships built on clear communication and attention to detail.

About C-West Custom Fixtures Booth 1304

C-West Custom Fixtures, founded in 1997, is a female-owned designer and manufacturer of custom fixtures for retail and corporate environments. With concept-to-completion services, the team brings clients’ visions to life across North America.

Jennie Ripps, Founder & CEO at Owl’s Brew

Jennie Ripps is the co-founder and CEO of Owl’s Brew. She believes in “drinking wise”, crafting functional adult beverages from ingredients that do more than taste good. Over a decade in, she’s grown the brand into a fixture everywhere from theme parks to your neighborhood grocery.

About Owl’s Brew   Booth 536

Owl’s Brew, founded in 2013, crafts award-winning, small-batch beverages (sometimes boozy) from real tea, real juice, and real botanicals, never artificial shortcuts. You’ll find them at Disney World, Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, SoFi Stadium, and beyond.

Meredith Moore – Founder & CEO at Artisan Financial Strategies

Meredith Moore is the Founder and CEO of Artisan Financial Strategies. A WBE-certified business owner herself, she has lived the challenge she now solves for clients from the inside. She brings business value, personal wealth, tax, legal, and protection together so women founders finally have one coordinated game plan.

About Artisan Financial Strategies Booth 223

Most women building serious businesses have a CPA, an attorney, and a financial advisor, but no one coordinating them. Artisan Financial Strategies is the financial “quarterback” that integrates business value, personal wealth, tax, legal, and protection into one plan.

Rhonda Sargent, President at Lamont, Hanley & Associates

Rhonda Sargent is the President of Lamont, Hanley & Associates. She leads a firm focused on elevating both revenue and reputation, with certified collectors and a professional approach across insurance, healthcare, and manufacturing. Under her leadership, strong recovery results never come at the expense of client relationships.

About Lamont, Hanley & Associates Booth 711

Lamont, Hanley & Associates is a national accounts-receivable management firm specializing in commercial and B2B collections. Many clients have trusted them for decades to recover past-due accounts while protecting cash flow and customer relationships.

Mary Kariotis, President & CEO at Merrimak Capital

Mary Kariotis is the President and CEO of Merrimak Capital. She leads the firm through a period of unprecedented growth, entering new global markets while deepening its core leasing and asset-recovery business. Under her leadership it has become a trusted partner to many of the world’s largest corporations.

About Merrimak Capital   Booth 1210

Merrimak Capital is a nationally certified woman-owned business and the leading independent leasing and asset-resale company, serving over 25% of the Fortune 500. From equipment leasing to fleet management and asset disposition, Merrimak operates across North America and beyond.

Bernita McCann Hightower – CEO at Next Generation Fuel

Bernita McCann Hightower is the President and CEO of Next Generation Fuel. As a woman in the petroleum industry, she’s a rare and powerful presence, and an intentional role model for the next generation of female leaders. She’s grown the company into one of the top women-owned energy companies in the country.

About Next Generation Fuel Booth 102

Next Generation Fuel is a certified Women-Owned Small Business and ISO-certified Tier 1 wholesale fuel distributor offering bulk fuel, fleet fueling, DEF, lubricants, and renewable fuels nationwide. More than a supplier, it’s a strategic energy partner focused on quality, cost-efficiency, and sustainability.

Maria Marino, Alex Bernstein & Katherine Anne Connolly – Co-Founders at Panic Panties

Maria Marino, Alex Bernstein, and Katherine Anne Connolly are the co-founders of Panic Panties. Three Syracuse University best friends, they launched the brand in 2019 — and went on to win WBENC’s national pitch competition for innovation. With 16M+ TikTok hashtag views and shelves in major retailers, the trio turned a relatable problem into a fast-growing brand.

About Panic Panties Booth 727 — Retail

Panic Panties is a certified women-owned brand bringing premium, individually wrapped, ready-to-wear underwear to travelers, gym-goers, and anyone facing a laundry emergency. Now in 5,000+ CVS stores, airports, and boutiques, it’s been called the “L’eggs of underwear.”

Sara Webb, Founder & CEO at InTandem Promotions

Sara Webb is the Founder and CEO of InTandem Promotions. She founded the company in 2013 and brings 20+ years in promotional products to building meaningful, measurable branding programs. She’s grown it into a national and international operation that connects companies with the people they care about.

About InTandem Promotions Booth 931

InTandem Promotions creates emotional connections through tangible, branded products, backed by in-house creative, technology, decorating, warehousing, and fulfillment. From online stores to global fulfillment, the team supports brands at home and around the world.

Julia Cross, Director of New Business Development at OmniSource Marketing Group

Julia Cross is the Director of New Business Development at OmniSource Marketing Group. She helps brands extend their reach through smart, strategic merchandising. She’s your connection point to a company that’s grown into a multimillion-dollar force in branded marketing.

About OmniSource Marketing Group Booth 1023

OmniSource Marketing Group is a privately held, Certified Women-Owned brand engagement agency, founded in 1989 by President and CEO Janie Goldberg — who saw potential in a single unused screen-printing press and turned it into a business. Today OmniSource is a $20-million-a-year firm representing brands like PepsiCo, Simon Malls, and Cummins across the globe.

Also on the Floor: Corporate Allies

Not every booth at the expo floor is woman-owned, some are corporate partners who show up at WBENC specifically to do business with women-owned suppliers. These two are worth knowing if you’re building a supplier-diversity program or looking to get into a major supply chain.

About B2Gnow Booth 1022

B2Gnow is the nation’s leading supplier-diversity, procurement, and grant-management software platform, powering business opportunities for women- and minority-owned suppliers for over 20 years. While not itself woman-owned, it’s led by a notably woman-heavy executive team and is a long-standing champion on the WBENC floor, worth a stop if your organization runs (or wants to run) a supplier-diversity program.

About Dexcom Booth 1222

Dexcom is a San Diego–based medical device leader known for its continuous glucose monitoring systems for people with type 1 and type 2 diabetes. A publicly traded corporation rather than a woman-owned business, Dexcom comes to WBENC to connect with and grow its base of women-owned suppliers.

If you see someone you should know, go say hello. The best part of WBENC was never the booths, it’s the women behind them, and the doors they open for one another.

Lidia Vijga

Lidia Vijga is a content engineer focused on building in-house growth engines and training AI agents that help companies scale content and dominate brand visibility across traditional and AI search. She is also co-founder of DeckLinks, bringing firsthand founder experience in building and scaling technology products.

The post Remarkable Women You Should Meet at WBENC 2026 appeared first on BYVI.

For most women building companies, the way fundraising actually works is rarely said out loud, something I came to understand while building and raising money for my own startup DeckLinks. It asks for a lot before you’ve raised a dollar. You need a warm introduction you probably don’t have. You’re also expected to fit a pattern (Stanford or MIT, ex-Google or ex-Meta, the second-time founder who already had one exit). And if money does come, it often costs you a board seat, a real chunk of your equity, and a timeline set by people who have never built anything themselves.

Plenty of good companies never get past that, not because the idea was weak, but because the door was narrow. AeQuitas Invest is worth paying attention to because it starts from the opposite premise, that almost none of that has to be the price of admission.

The Current State of Funding for Women

Women start nearly half of all businesses in the United States, yet startups led by women receive less than 2% of U.S. venture capital, according to PitchBook’s dashboard data.

That is not a performance problem. Women-founded companies have been shown to deliver roughly 2.5 times better returns than male-founded ones, and women entrepreneurs earn 78 cents for every dollar invested, compared with 31 cents for men. The capital is simply not following the results.

“I built AeQuitas Invest because I believe the answer isn’t to fix venture capital from within. It’s to build infrastructure alongside it — infrastructure that expands who gets to invest, who gets to raise, and how capital actually flows.”

Molly Huyck, CO-Founder at AeQuitas Invest

A Crowdfunding Platform Built by Women, for Women

Launched in 2024 by former PayPal executive Molly Huyck and U.S. Navy veteran and marketing executive Amie Konwinski, AeQuitas Invest (known as AQi) is an SEC-registered, FINRA-member funding portal that lets women-led businesses raise capital directly from everyday investors through Regulation Crowdfunding.

It is, by the founders’ account, the only U.S. portal founded by women, owned by women, and exclusively serving women-owned companies.

The 5 myths that keep women from raising

In a recent conversation with Crunchbase News, co-founders Molly Huyck and Amie Konwinski laid out the case for the platform. For a founder weighing whether to even start, the most useful way to understand AQi is through the 5 myths they take apart.

Myth 1: “Raising from the crowd is just asking for charity.”

It isn’t, and the distinction matters. “Kickstarter and GoFundMe are for charitable gifting,” Konwinski said. “We are not asking for charity; we are facilitating investments.” On AQi, the people who back you become investors who receive equity, not donors collecting a tote bag. The platform sits in the same regulated category as StartEngine and Wefunder — but with economics tilted toward the founder. “On platforms like Kickstarter, you might only keep about 60% of the funds raised,” Konwinski noted. “Our success fee is only 6.5%.” For a founder, that gap is the difference between a campaign that funds the business and one that funds the platform.

Myth 2: “The $5 million cap means it’s not real money.”

Regulation Crowdfunding limits a raise to $5 million in any 12-month period, and founders often dismiss it as small. The founders push back hard. “I would challenge the notion that $5 million isn’t enough,” Konwinski said. “For many of the companies we work with, that is a strong runway for 18 to 24 months.” And because Reg CF allows rolling raises, the ceiling resets: a company can raise up to $5 million every 12 months, hit a real milestone, and then pursue a Series A from a position of strength. “We are here for those who get ‘ghosted’ by VCs,” Konwinski said, “or don’t want to leverage their homes to secure an SBA loan.”

Myth 3: “To raise, you have to give away control.”

This is the belief that costs founders the most, and it is where AQi’s model diverges most sharply from venture capital. “VCs often demand board seats, veto rights and up to 20% equity,” Konwinski said. “With us, founders usually give up only 5% to 10% equity, allowing them to maintain control of the company they built from the ground up.”

Myth 4: “A crowd of small investors will wreck your cap table.”

The fear that hundreds of small investors will clutter a cap table and frighten off future backers is handled structurally. “We utilize special-purpose vehicles,” Huyck said. “This consolidates all Reg CF investors into a single line item on the company’s cap table, often with a lead investor managing voting rights. This keeps the cap table clean.” In other words, you can open your raise to the public and still walk into a Series A conversation with a tidy structure and your authority intact.

Myth 5: “Without a VC breathing down your neck, you’ll lose discipline.”

The founders see it the other way around. “Women entrepreneurs are natural ‘hustlers’ who are inherently self-motivated,” Konwinski said, pointing to a base of Gen X founders balancing companies with families who have “developed an incredible ability to multitask and execute.” Discipline doesn’t require a director with veto power; it requires good counsel. “We encourage founders to bring on advisers rather than giving up board seats too early,” Huyck said. The same goes for the exit. Many women founders are mission-driven and have never been forced to think about one. “We provide the guidance to help them think through those horizons,” Huyck said, “so they can make informed decisions rather than being forced into a timeline by traditional VC pressure.”

Why women can’t wait for VC to change

Huyck doesn’t expect the venture world to fix itself. “I don’t see the VC space changing soon because it is heavily reliant on ‘pattern matching,’ where investors look for people and paths that resemble previous successes,” she said. “Until that breaks, women founders face significant barriers. Crowdfunding is a vital, viable alternative.” Her conviction is personal: two decades at PayPal, mentoring women through the Cherie Blair Foundation, where she learned of the $5 trillion gap in global GDP tied to women entrepreneurs’ lack of access to capital.

What AQi adds on top of the regulated mechanics is a hand to hold. The founders describe themselves as a “quarterback,” connecting entrepreneurs to accountants, lawyers and marketing firms, whether they are just starting or ready for a “glow-up.” “On many larger platforms, you are processed through an AI-driven, automated checklist,” Konwinski said. “We are building relationships, talking to our founders, and acting as their partner throughout the process.”

Where the AeQuitas Invest platform is now

The platform spent its first year building technology and six more months clearing SEC and FINRA registration — friction the founders wear as a badge, because it is what lets investors trust the marketplace. It now has a pipeline of 20 businesses, closed its first campaign in May 2026, and has more launching in the weeks ahead. For a founder who has been told to wait for a warm intro that never comes, the message underneath all 5 myths is the same: the door you were told to knock on isn’t the only door. This one was built for you, and it’s already open.

About the Author

Lidia Vijga

Lidia Vijga is a content engineer focused on building in-house growth engines and training AI agents that help companies scale content and dominate brand visibility across traditional and AI search. She is also co-founder of DeckLinks, bringing firsthand founder experience in building and scaling technology products.

The post Funding for Female Founders: How AeQuitas Is Rewriting the Playbook appeared first on BYVI.

Deep tech companies face a unique paradox: the harder the science, the longer the runway required before anyone can tell if it will work. The investors willing to fund that uncertainty are few, the milestones are non-obvious, and the playbooks from software startups rarely transfer.

At a panel hosted at the Schwartz Reisman Innovation Campus, 3 of Canada’s most active deep tech investors shared what they actually look for, from first-check pre-seed bets through Series A.

About the Panelists

Neha Khera is Managing Partner of IRV, Innovobot’s deep tech fund. She co-founded 500 Startups Canada and was a General Partner at 2048 Ventures in New York. She holds a mechanical engineering degree from the University of Waterloo and an MBA from Richard Ivey Business School.

Charles Lespérance is a Partner at Celesta VC. He co-founded BDC’s $200 million Deep Tech Venture Fund, backing early-stage companies in quantum computing, AI, semiconductors, and robotics. He holds an MBA from Harvard and a mechanical engineering degree from McGill

Zeeshan Ali is a Partner at Wittington Ventures, leading the firm’s early-stage Innovation Fund focused on climate and healthcare deep tech. He was previously Managing Director of the MaRS Investment Accelerator Fund, one of Canada’s most active seed-stage funds.

Samuel Mugel is Co-Founder and CTO of Multiverse Computing, a quantum computing company. He holds a PhD jointly awarded by ICFO (Spain) and the University of Southampton (UK) and serves on the McKinsey Tech Council and Forbes Tech Council.

Where Capital Is Flowing Right Now

The framing that dominated the panel’s opening was a historical analogy: AI today resembles electricity in the early industrial era. The first wave of benefit was marginal, a 10% efficiency gain here, a lower defect rate there. The real transformation came when factories and processes were redesigned from the ground up with electricity built in. We are entering that second phase.

“Where we are right now with AI is sort of at that point — and so the broad category, what we can call ‘physical AI,’ is thinking: now that we know AI exists, how can we rebuild industries? How can we rebuild companies and processes from the ground up, acknowledging AI is just the way this thing can work.”

Charles Lespérance, Celesta VC

Capital is flowing into 3 overlapping areas:

1. Physical AI and robotics — smart factories, autonomous systems, and hardware products that embed AI into real-world processes rather than sitting on top of them.
2. Semiconductor and compute infrastructure — the architecture and memory innovations needed to handle increasing AI workloads.
3. Defense and sovereign technology — geopolitics is creating a new class of first-buyer: nation-states with higher willingness to pay, longer adoption timelines, and a strategic imperative to fund hardware applications that would previously have taken too long to become venture-compatible.

The Wrapper Test: Separating Real Companies from Quick Builds

With so much excitement around AI applications, founders often ask whether what they’re building is a durable business or a thin layer sitting on top of someone else’s model. The panel offered a clean heuristic:

Localization is one emerging thesis.

Neha Khera from IRV described a contrarian bet: while most investors are doubling down on data center growth, the cost of token inference is becoming prohibitive enough that distributed, on-device or regional AI becomes the more interesting build.

“Our thesis is actually swinging the other way. We think localization is going to start to boom. We think this whole concept of token maxing is going to become too cost prohibitive.”

Neha Khera, IRV / Innovobot

When Does a Project Become a Company?

For researchers and scientists considering commercialization, this is the first real decision point. The panel was clear that great science and a viable company are not the same thing, and investors see the full spectrum.

Zeeshan Ali from Wittington Ventures described 3 signals that separate a project from a company in formation:

1. Founder conviction on a specific application — not just “this science is interesting” but “this is the exact problem I am building to solve.”
2. Market signals in the ecosystem — a potential customer, a partner expressing intent, a regulatory opening, or some external proof that the application has pull beyond the lab.
3. A founder psychology shift — the willingness to optimize for company building rather than the next publication. Speed, go-to-market, and team formation must displace the academic reward cycle.

Samuel Mugel, moderator and CTO of Multiverse Computing, offered a founder’s perspective: Multiverse operated as a non-profit association from 2017 to 2019, publishing research and conducting business development, before formally incorporating. By the time they raised capital, they had customers, a reputation, and a story that investors could validate — an unusually strong position for a company at that stage.

“By the time we decided to incorporate in 2019 we felt we had enough notoriety, we had the reputation and we had our first customers. So in 2018 we went through Creative Destruction Lab as one of the only startups there that had actual customers.”

Samuel Mugel, Multiverse Computing

Pre-Seed: What Gets Funded and at What Terms

Pre-seed in deep tech typically corresponds to TRL (Technology Readiness Level) 4 or 5 — meaning commercial trials have not yet begun, and the technology is still being validated in a controlled or simulated environment. Investors at this stage cannot de-risk the technology. What they are underwriting is the team and the application.

Typical Pre-Seed Parameters

• Raise amount: $1–$3M is the typical range for a Canadian deep tech pre-seed.
• Valuation: a $5M post-money valuation is a common reference point, though it can rise to $10M depending on team pedigree, market dynamics, and the defensibility of the IP.
• Founding Team: First-time founders skew toward the lower end. Repeat founders with track records can command a premium.

The Milestone Sizing Trap

One of the most practical warnings from the panel: do not raise an amount that is insufficient to hit a meaningful de-risking milestone.

“Don’t raise the money if you don’t think it’s enough to get to a substantial de-risking milestone — because you’re only going to get one shot at that. Some ideas just need $10–20M even to be spun out. Don’t raise $2M because you think that’s what you can raise if you know you need $20M.” — Charles Lespérance, Celesta VC

If your technology requires running a full mask set at TSMC on a two-nanometer process node, you cannot prove anything meaningful on $1.5M. Investors will not be able to evaluate you, and a failed pre-seed round is much harder to recover from than an adequately sized one.

What the Founding Team Must Show

The panel converged on complementary skills as the most important predictor at the pre-seed stage, but diverged on what that looks like exactly:

The common thread: the founding team must be able to raise capital, articulate a vision, set strategy, and engage customers. Whether that requires one person who can do all of it or two complementary people is fund-dependent — so founder-investor fit matters as much as team composition.

The Cap Table: Clean vs. Messy

A clean cap table at the pre-seed stage is a prerequisite for raising future rounds. The panel described what “clean” looks like, and catalogued the most common failure modes.

The Ideal Cap Table Structure

Red Flags That Kill Rounds

• Academic advisors owning majority of the shares while working part-time.
• Draconian IP agreements with royalty clauses that make the company’s economics unworkable.
• Venture studios taking 40–50% of equity in exchange for incubation support.
• Complex holding structures built without experienced startup counsel.

The Series A: The Hardest Round

Every panelist agreed: the Series A is the hardest raise, not because of market conditions, but because the bar shifts fundamentally. Pre-seed is a bet on people and potential. Series A demands that the gap between technology and product has been substantially closed — and that you can demonstrate it.

The Core Principle: One Risk at a Time

Celesta’s framework was explicit: at Series A, they are willing to take either technology risk or market risk, but not both simultaneously.

“By the time you come to us to raise a Series A, you need to have a really good sense for: once you’re done building your thing and you have production samples, who’s going to buy it, how much are they going to pay for it, what design slot is it going into, what are your margin details.” — Charles Lespérance, Celesta VC

Revenue is not required. But customer discovery is. There is a critical difference. You do not need to have made sales — but you must have done enough customer work that you know exactly what specifications you are building to, which customers will buy at what price, and what your supply chain will require. Discovering your customer’s actual requirements after you have already committed to a foundry or a material process can cost 24–36 months and be unrecoverable.

Why Deep Tech Series A Investors Are Hard to Find

The number of Series A investors globally who have deep tech — specifically hardware — as a core thesis is far smaller than the number of software Series A investors. The problem is that many software-oriented funds are beginning to expand into deep tech without changing how they underwrite companies. They still expect SaaS-style revenue metrics and ARR growth. Founders can waste significant time in these conversations.

• Know your investor’s actual thesis before a first meeting.
• If a fund evaluates your hardware company the way they evaluate a SaaS business, move on.
• Deep tech Series A investors will review patents, evaluate IP defensibility, and build views on technology timelines, not just revenue trajectories.

Canada vs. the US: The Incorporation Question

The question of where to incorporate — and when to flip to a US entity — came up repeatedly. The panel’s consensus was clear: stay Canadian early, and defer the US move unless there is a specific commercial reason to do it now.

Why Canada First

“Non-dilutive capital is the cheapest form of financing. That and revenue. Leverage it. It is your friend. Don’t be so swayed by this US pull so early in your journey.”— Neha Khera, IRV / Innovobot

When to Access US Markets

The Series A or B stage is the natural inflection point. At that scale, money crosses borders effectively, the transaction friction is low relative to the capital involved. Accessing global investors at Series A or B sends a signal that you are not a regional champion but a global one.

The exceptions are commercial necessity — for example, US defense contracts that require an American entity with appropriate IP firewalls. In those cases, the move can happen earlier. But absent a specific commercial reason, the panel’s advice was to defer.

What’s Structurally Missing in Canada

The panel was candid about the ecosystem’s gaps:

• Dilutive capital is sparse.
  There are approximately 9 dedicated deep tech investors nationally, a thin market for the volume of deep science being produced at Canadian universities.
• No retail investor culture in startups.
  Canada has world-class pension funds, but that capital is concentrated and conservative. Individual and retail investors are largely absent from the startup asset class.
• Translational infrastructure.
  The ability to move from proof of concept to pilot to adoption — particularly in regulated sectors like healthcare and climate — requires operator density, procurement pathways, and commercialization expertise that is more concentrated in Boston and San Francisco than in Canadian cities.
• Foreign investment attraction.
  The incentive infrastructure for attracting global capital to Canadian companies requires more deliberate effort.

7. Exit Pathways: What Actually Works in Canada

The honest answer from the panel: M&A exits within Canada are difficult, and will remain so for the foreseeable future. The industrial fabric of the country — heavily weighted toward resource extraction, financial services, and retail — does not produce a natural acquirer base for deep tech companies. The few Canadian corporations that could theoretically buy a deep tech company typically carry high debt loads and weak balance sheets.

The IPO path is more viable, as Shopify and Xanadu have demonstrated. Christian Weedbrook of Xanadu publicly described keeping his company incorporated in Canada through his entire fundraising journey — a choice that extended his timeline by at least two years, but preserved CCPC status and other structural advantages.

“Right now it looks like a really dire situation — can Canada actually build tech companies that are going to succeed? And then you zoom back a little bit and realize: at one point, Nortel was the seventh most valuable company in the world. There is no inherent reason we couldn’t do it again.” – Charles Lespérance, Celesta VC

The longer-term ambition, articulated by Charles Lespérance, is to build Canadian companies large enough that they become acquirers themselves — recreating the M&A ecosystem that existed around Nortel rather than perpetually exiting to US strategics.

8. The Investor’s Role Beyond Capital

At the pre-seed and seed stage in deep tech, the gap between what investors bring and what founders need is about more than money. The panel emphasized ecosystem value: introductions to customers, help with early hiring, and access to commercialization pathways that technical founders may not know how to navigate alone.

Wittington Ventures, through its connection to the Weston family foundation, can help portfolio companies access non-dilutive funding streams they would not otherwise find. Celesta’s semiconductor expertise means founders get supply chain advice that generalist investors cannot offer.

“Truly understanding what your investors’ ecosystem value is can really help founders think through their business as they’re scaling up at an early stage.”

Zeeshan Ali, Wittington Ventures

Key Takeaways by Audience

For Founders Building Deep Tech Companies

• Size your pre-seed to hit a real de-risking milestone, not just to survive the next six months.
• Clean your cap table before you raise — complex structures are nearly impossible to unwind after capital is in.
• Do customer discovery before Series A even if you are pre-revenue. Know exactly who will buy, at what spec, and at what price.
• Leverage Canadian non-dilutive capital (IRAP, SR&ED) aggressively. It is the cheapest financing available after revenue.
• Incorporate in Canada and defer a US flip until Series A or B, unless there is a specific commercial reason to move earlier.
• Match your investor to your company type. A fund that underwrites hardware like SaaS will waste your time.

For Researchers and Scientists Considering Commercialization

• Identify the specific application before incorporating. Investors are funding a problem to be solved, not interesting science.
• Part-time involvement is possible, but your equity stake should reflect your actual time commitment.
• Founder psychology matters as much as technical expertise. Optimizing for the next paper and optimizing for company building are incompatible at the same time.
• Consider using a non-profit or research entity structure for the first 1–2 years to build reputation and early customer relationships before formal incorporation.

For Operators in Technical or R&D-Driven Companies

• Deep tech companies are not software businesses with longer timelines — the KPIs, milestones, and investor expectations are fundamentally different.
• The gap between POC and adoption in regulated sectors (healthcare, climate) is one of the largest structural barriers in Canada. Operators who can bridge this gap are in short supply and high demand.
• If your company is approaching a US expansion decision, assess CCPC implications for your employees’ stock options before making the move.

For Investors Evaluating Early-Stage Deep Tech

• Pre-seed in deep tech means TRL 4–5: you are underwriting team and application thesis, not technology performance.
• Series A requires the de-risking of either tech risk or market risk — not both. Be explicit about which one you are taking.
• University spin-out IP structures vary enormously. Read the licensing agreements before term-sheeting.
• Canada has ~9 dedicated deep tech investors. The gap between supply and demand in dilutive capital is real and represents an opportunity for new entrants.

Lidia Vijga

Lidia Vijga is a content engineer focused on building in-house growth engines and training AI agents that help companies scale content and dominate brand visibility across traditional and AI search. She is also co-founder of DeckLinks, bringing firsthand founder experience in building and scaling technology products.

The post How to Build a Deep Tech Company: Insights from Leading Investors appeared first on BYVI.

In 2009, a PhD student, Lester Mackey, entered a competition Netflix had created to find the best movie recommendation algorithm. The prize was a million dollars. The rules were simple: beat Netflix’s own algorithm by 10%. There was just one problem: the dataset was too large to fit on a laptop.

Mackey asked a labmate who would become his co-founder if they could build something to handle it. They wrote 600 lines of code over a weekend. Mackey competed. He tied for first place on the improvement score. He lost the million dollars because the other team submitted their entry 20 minutes earlier.

That 600-line weekend project became Apache Spark. The open source standard for data processing used by most of the world’s largest companies. The seed of Databricks, now valued at over $130 billion.

Reynold Xin, Databricks’ co-founder, tells this story without drama. That’s partly his style, but it’s also because he understands something most founders spend years resisting: the beginning of a great company almost never looks like one. It looks like a competition you lose. A product nobody will pay for. And 3 years of misery in the middle of what looks, from the outside, like a success.

When Traction Is a Lie

By 2013, Databricks was a real company with real momentum. Apache Spark had become the de facto standard for large-scale data processing. Thousands of engineers were showing up to conferences. There were selfies. There was what Reynold diplomatically calls “massive open source traction.”

There was also, by the end of 2015, roughly 1M dollars in annual revenue. 3 years in.

“We were a commercial failure for the first 3 years,” Reynold says.

“From the outside it was hard to understand because a lot of the metrics were vanity metrics about open source adoption. But when you looked at revenue…”

And this is a huge trap. Not failure — the appearance of success while the business itself doesn’t work. The metrics that feel good are not the metrics that matter. Thousands of downloads and a room full of raving fans is not a business.

The breakthrough, when it came, had two parts.

First: building actual go-to-market machinery. Databricks was a group of engineers and founders wandering around trying to sell a product. That’s fine as a learning experience — Reynold believes it — but it doesn’t scale. You need the infrastructure of a real business.

Second, and more fundamentally: creating proprietary IP. This is the part founders of open source projects resist most. But Reynold puts it like this:

“Just because we created a massively successful open source ecosystem doesn’t mean customers should pay us for what they’d have gotten for free. There needed to be some value that was justified.”

The vision didn’t change. The go-to-market and the proprietary layer had to be built around it. One without the other is either a movement or a charity.

What Mike Did That Almost Nobody Does

Before Ada, Mike Murchison was building a consumer app. It was growing. And then, the way scaling companies do, it started treating its own customers as a liability.

“Customer service got worse the bigger we got,” he says. “We went from knowing our users’ names, craving their feedback — to our customer service operations being focused entirely on reducing contact.”

He started cold-calling VPs of Customer Experience to understand why. He talked to twelve of them. All twelve said the same thing: we talk to our customers less as we grow. Customer service is a cost center. I am literally compensated on how much I can reduce contact this year.

“When I heard that maybe the twelfth time in a row,” Mike says, “I started to develop a thesis.”

Here is where Mike did something most founders don’t. He didn’t go build. He went back to those same twelve VPs and asked if he and his co-founder could join their teams — as customer service agents. Seven said yes. He spent a year in the weeds, working support queues, learning the operations from the inside, before he revealed what he was actually building.

“We learned very manually how to provide great service at scale,” he says. “That has informed our approach and continues to today.”

This is the thing that separates deep founders from competent ones. Mike didn’t just understand the problem intellectually. He lived it. He wasn’t studying the problem from the outside. He was the problem.

The Only Advice That Actually Matters

Reynold texted his co-founders before going on stage: What advice would you give?

Several responded. Then their CEO, Ali Ghodsi, replied: “I disagree with all of the above.” And offered a single sentence.

“Nothing can substitute for creating a product that is 10 times better than something else that exists.”

That’s it. Not 10 times better than the closest alternative at some features. 10 times better, full stop. Or going zero-to-one — solving something that was previously impossible. Do either of those things and you have a business. Do neither and no amount of execution, culture, or fundraising will save you.

“The 10x doesn’t mean exactly ten times,” Reynold clarifies. “It means it can’t be something fairly incremental if you actually want to build a very successful business.”

Mike adds the practical path:

“When you start a company, you’re so resource-constrained. You look at successful companies and think – they have resources, infrastructure, distribution that I don’t have. But there is one thing you can genuinely be the best in the world at: understanding your problem more deeply than anyone else.

That’s the edge. Not capital. Not talent. Not even technology. All of which you can eventually acquire. The edge is understanding. And it’s available to everyone who’s willing to actually do the work of getting it.

When Reynold talks about customer obsession, he’s not talking about a cultural value written on a wall. He means something specific. He was doing 10 customer meetings himself — not his sales team, not his product managers — over a two-week stretch that spanned an American holiday. He texts design partners on a first-name basis. He asks them not “what’s wrong with the product” but “what are your concerns” and “what else can we do for you.” The distinction matters. One question narrows, and the other opens.

Right now, those conversations are surfacing a single theme: AI token costs.

The world has swung from “use more, use more, use use use” to “I burned through my entire annual budget in the first quarter, now what?” Every company is having this conversation. That’s a product opportunity. You only find it if you’re in the room.

What the AI Era Actually Changes

Both founders are building AI companies and running their businesses on AI. Here is their take.

The cost of writing software is falling fast. A two-person team can do work that used to require a hundred people. The arbitrage opportunity for small companies right now is speed — moving while large incumbents are still figuring out their governance and approval processes.

Mike says:

“Showing up as a two-person team that can do the work of a hundred-person team really does make a difference, more so than it used to.”

Taste Is the New Moat

There’s a question that used to be fairly simple for founders: what makes us defensible? You’d answer it with technology, patents, network effects, switching costs. The standard toolkit.

Mike Murchison thinks the answer has changed:

“The most important thing right now is taste. It’s never been more important for you to say: this is what an amazing experience looks like, and to be able to paint it.”

He’s not talking about design sensibility. He’s talking about something harder: the ability to hold a precise, uncompromising vision of greatness at the exact moment when building has never been cheaper, faster, or more democratic.

At Ada, almost everyone in the company is now creating pull requests, contributing directly to the product, regardless of their background. Non-technical people shipping features. The cost of participation has collapsed.

That premium shows up in a specific way: the people who will win are the ones who can clearly say “this is not good enough”, before the market tells them. Not after the NPS score comes back. Not after a competitor ships. Before. The vision has to be internal and precise, not external and reactive.

Reynold agrees, and then adds a wrinkle that makes the argument more complicated.

“If you assume the cost of software continues going down,” he says, “one natural outcome is that it becomes easy to copy. You can reduce taste by poor judgment, yes. But you can also simply copy it.”

His point:

Taste is real and it matters, but it isn’t a durable moat by itself. What can’t be copied overnight is the oldest, most unsexy list in business — brand, distribution, trust.

“A red Ferrari is a red Ferrari,” Reynold says. “You can’t have a red Xiaomi and sell it for half a million dollars.”

For founders at the earliest stages, this sounds like bad news — you don’t have any of those things.

Read it differently and it’s actually clarifying. In the short run, taste and speed are your moats. Move fast, build something extraordinary, get close to your customers before larger players figure out their governance process. In the long run, you’re racing to convert that early advantage into brand, distribution, and trust before the window closes.

The companies that do both — start with taste, compound into moats — are the ones that become generational.

The question to ask yourself isn’t whether you have taste. It’s whether you can define, specifically, what “extraordinary” looks like in your market — and whether every decision you’re making right now moves toward it or away from it.

The Things Successful Founders Don’t Usually Say

Reynold says something at the end of this conversation that most successful founders won’t say. Asked whether founders should start companies, he doesn’t give the standard answer.

“If you’re a strong engineer who can find a well-paying job,” he says carefully, “the expected value of working might actually be higher. The risk of failure is pretty high.”

He says it not to discourage anyone, but because he’s being honest in a room full of people who are about to make a consequential decision. He follows it with:

“That said, fail once, fail three times, keep going. There’s nothing wrong with it. The rate of learning is the highest with entrepreneurship. You will develop a skill set that your peers who went to big companies simply won’t have.”

Mike extends it: “The downside is so much more minimal than you think. And there’s so much more upside in starting something than most people realize.”

Both of them, in different ways, are pointing at the same thing. The failure people fear is rarely as catastrophic as it feels in advance. The learning is irreplaceable. And the environment you choose — the five people you spend most of your time with, the peer group that shapes what you think is ambitious and what isn’t — turns out to be one of the most important decisions you make.

“You can be the best in the world at understanding your problem,” Mike says. “You get to choose who influences you to be more ambitious. Those are both in your control.”

That’s the brick. The rest is building.

About the author

Lidia Vijga

Lidia Vijga is a content engineer focused on building in-house growth engines and training AI agents that help companies scale content and dominate brand visibility across traditional and AI search. She is also co-founder of DeckLinks, bringing firsthand founder experience in building and scaling technology products.

The post How to Build a $100B Company, Brick by Brick appeared first on BYVI.

At Stripe Press, Klarna and Stripe took the stage to make a case that might surprise most e-commerce teams: the biggest threat to your sales in an AI-driven world isn’t a bad checkout experience – it’s never being found in the first place.

The talk, centered on agentic commerce, offered a ground-level look at an infrastructure shift that’s already in motion. AI traffic to e-commerce sites is up 393% year-on-year according to Adobe’s Q1 2026 report. But the opportunity that number represents is being quietly squandered, because the product catalogs agents are being sent to read were never built for machines.

The Invisible Catalog Problem

This was the statistic that opened the discussion:

That’s not a rounding error. It means the majority of product pages that an AI shopping agent visits today are returning incomplete data. And incomplete data means the agent can’t confidently recommend the product. From the agent’s perspective, those items might as well not exist.

To make the point concrete, the speakers walked through a case study of a major activewear brand. The brand had 160,000 products in its catalog. Of those, only 10,000 (just 6%) were actually discoverable by AI agents.

“For that reason, the AI agents are not able to confidently compare, rank and recommend this product.”

Without GTINs, agents couldn’t build complete product cards. Without product cards, they couldn’t make recommendations. The brand’s catalog was effectively invisible at the most important new layer of commerce.

The framing was direct and simple: “If you can’t be found in this layer, your product doesn’t ever have a chance of being purchased at all.”

3 Attributes That Unlock AI Discoverability

The talk distilled the discoverability problem down to 3 catalog attributes that every merchant needs to get right.

1. GTIN (Global Trade Item Number)

GTINs are the connective tissue of agentic commerce. They’re the identifier that lets an AI agent match your product listing against the same item sold by other retailers – enabling comparison, ranking, and confident recommendation.

2. Shipping Cost

Agents don’t rank on product price alone. They rank on total price. If your shipping cost isn’t part of your feed, the agent is presenting an incomplete picture to the consumer, and your product will lose out to one where the full economics are visible.

“If you’re not giving a full picture to the agent and the consumer, your product won’t be picked.”

3. Delivery Time

When a consumer tells an agent “I need these running shoes by Friday,” the agent filters its results to products where delivery by that date is confirmed. It doesn’t guess or check elsewhere. If your delivery window isn’t explicitly stated in your product feed, your item is excluded from that search entirely — no matter how good the price or how relevant the product.

All 3 attributes are prerequisites, not nice-to-haves. The agents doing the searching require structured, machine-readable data to do their job – and merchants who haven’t built for that are already falling behind.

Klarna’s Discovery Layer

Behind the scenes, Klarna has built the infrastructure designed to power agentic product discovery at scale: 100 million unique products, 400 million merchant offers, 4,300 subcategories, and one million merchant partners — all surfaced through a single API that’s normalized across merchants, LLM-optimized, and protocol-agnostic.

The pitch is straightforward: agents query the graph, get structured product data in real time, and can reliably compare and rank items across different sellers. As the speaker described it: “This graph really is what allows your products to be found.”

Rethinking How Payments Work in Agentic Flows

If the first half of the talk was about discovery, the second was about what happens after an agent finds the right product, and why the payment handoff is more complicated than it looks.

In traditional e-commerce, the buyer and the payment processor are in the same session. In agentic commerce, they’re not. The agent acts on behalf of the buyer, but the merchant still needs to process the charge. Alison from Stripe framed this as a fundamental separation:

“Payment intent is being separated from payment processing.”

To solve this, Stripe created Shared Payment Tokens (SPTs). The concept works like a sealed package: the agent creates a token scoped to a specific seller, for a specific timeframe, containing the buyer’s payment credentials. That package is handed to the merchant, who opens it, reviews it, and decides whether to process it or decline.

“You’re able to scope it to a specific seller, a specific time, and then you issue that to the seller and the seller at that time when they receive it, can open it up and they can say, I like what I see, I’m going to process as payment.”

Crucially, SPTs work with existing infrastructure — existing network tokens, device tokens, Klarna tokens. When Stripe launched SPTs, they supported cards only; Klarna support has since been added, with expansion to 100+ payment methods underway through Stripe’s growing ecosystem.

What This Means for Merchants Already on Stripe

For merchants already using Stripe and Klarna, the practical lift is close to zero. Agentic flows reuse existing Stripe components. Existing fraud configurations, Radar risk signals, and payment method settings carry over automatically. As Alison put it: “If you have enabled Klarna, it is already enabled in your agentic flows.”

Product catalogs can be fed into the discovery layer via CSV upload or import APIs, with the option to plug in existing commerce stack integrations rather than rebuilding from scratch.

In Agentic Commerce, a Failed Transaction Has No Recovery Play

One of the more striking moments in the talk was the discussion of what happens when an agentic transaction fails, and why it’s categorically different from a regular abandoned cart.

In standard e-commerce, a failed checkout is painful but recoverable. You can retarget, send a follow-up email, offer a discount. The consumer is still reachable. In an agentic flow, that path largely disappears. As the speaker explained:

“That’s very different when there’s a failed experience in an agentic flow, because that’s something that a consumer might not recover from, at least not quickly.”

Worse, a failed transaction doesn’t just cost the merchant a sale, it damages the consumer’s trust in the agent itself. “They might not trust that agent very quickly again.” This changes what agents optimize for. Rather than pure conversion, they weight for reliability in roughly this order: consumer trust, payment flexibility, post-purchase liability, and then approval certainty.

Account Linking Challenge in Agentic Commerce

The talk closed on one of the more existential concerns merchants raised: how do you maintain a direct relationship with your customer when an agent is in the middle?

Personalization, loyalty programs, purchase history, recommendations — all of it depends on knowing who the customer is. When an agent intermediates the transaction, that connection can break. As Alison noted:

“That’s probably one of the number one pieces of pushback we hear from merchants when we’re talking about agentic commerce – how do I maintain that relationship with my customer?”

Account linking is the proposed answer, connecting the consumer’s identity across agentic flows so merchants can preserve personalization and relationship data. “Solving the account linking challenge is what will allow them to really bring that rich experience and the personalization into agentic flows.”

The Takeaway

Agentic commerce isn’t on the horizon, it’s already scaling. The 393% growth in AI traffic is being driven by agents that are actively shopping, comparing, and recommending right now. The merchants who will win in this environment are the ones who’ve done the foundational work: clean GTINs, complete shipping data, accurate delivery windows, and product feeds built for machines to read.

The checkout experience still matters. But by the time a consumer reaches it, the hardest work is already done — or it isn’t. In agentic commerce, the sale is won or lost in the catalog, long before anyone clicks buy.

About the Author

Lidia Vijga

Lidia Vijga is a content engineer focused on building in-house growth engines and training AI agents that help companies scale content and dominate brand visibility across traditional and AI search. She is also co-founder of DeckLinks, bringing firsthand founder experience in building and scaling technology products.

The post In Agentic Commerce, the Sale Is Lost Before the Cart appeared first on BYVI.

A VP of Customer Success at a Series C SaaS company spent months building what she was proud of: a proper CS machine. Health scores tied to product usage. Automated alerts at 90, 60, and 30 days before renewal. A QBR cadence. A team of CSMs who knew their books of business cold.

Then one of her best accounts churned. She found out why a year later: the customer had quietly shifted strategy 9 months earlier, following a new CFO hire. There was no signal in the data. No flag in the CRM. No alert. Just a renewal conversation that started three weeks before expiration, and a customer who had already made up their mind.

This is the central contradiction of proactive customer success: most of it isn’t proactive at all.

The CS Mantra That Became a Myth

“Proactive customer success” has become the operating philosophy for virtually every CS org at growth-stage companies. Conference tracks are dedicated to it. Job descriptions demand it. Entire platforms have been built around it.

And yet churn keeps happening. Net Revenue Retention keeps disappointing. And CS leaders at Series C companies (companies that have already figured out product-market fit, that have mature CS organizations, that are spending real money on tooling) are the ones who feel this most acutely.

These teams aren’t failing for lack of effort. The tools they’re running on were designed around a narrower model of what knowing your customer actually means.

What Actually Breaks at Series C

At Series A and B, customer success is still a relationship business. You have a manageable number of accounts, relatively similar customers, and enough CSM bandwidth to maintain deep context on each one. You can look across 3 to 5 systems to understand an account and you can get away with outreach that treats your base as a single segment. It works because the math still works.

Series C breaks this entirely.

“Headcount cannot solve the issue,” says Archana Somasegar, founder of MineMe, a customer intelligence platform.

“As your customer base diversifies, you need to bring data into one place to raise real opportunities and separate signal from noise.”

Archana Somasegar, founder of MineMe

The portfolio grows. Customer profiles diverge. The CSM-to-account ratio stretches. And the “proactive” motions that worked at smaller scale (the health score dashboards, the renewal-triggered workflows, the QBR cadences) start to collapse. Not because the tools are bad, but because they were designed for a world that no longer exists.

The strategic imperative also shifts. At Series A/B, the name of the game is new logo acquisition. By Series C, the growth model has to run on retention and expansion: maximizing revenue from an existing, diversifying customer base. That requires a completely different CS playbook, and most organizations are still running the old one.

The Blind Spot in Every CRM

Here is the architectural problem: your CRM was built to track what is happening in your world. Product usage. Support tickets. NPS responses. Login frequency. Health scores. It is, in every meaningful sense, a record of your customer’s relationship with your product.

A new CFO who comes in with a mandate to cut SaaS spend. A layoff that eliminates the internal champion who drove your product’s adoption. An earnings call where the CEO announces a strategic pivot away from the use case your product serves. A competitor product launch that reshapes their roadmap.

These are the signals that actually predict churn, and almost no CS platform ingests them natively.

This is the proactive customer success trap: teams invest in faster, more sophisticated reaction (better health scores, more granular triggers, more automated playbooks) and call it proactivity. But reacting quickly to signals your own system generates is still, structurally, reactive. You’re just shortening the lag.

The Real Difference Between Reactive and Proactive Customer Success

The distinction is more consequential than most CS leaders acknowledge.

Reactive CS, even when fast, operates inside a closed loop: something changes in your data, a workflow fires, a CSM acts. The ceiling on this approach is determined by the quality of data you already hold, and that data is almost entirely backward-looking.

Truly proactive CS operates in open context: the customer’s business environment is continuously modeled, signals from outside the product are weighted alongside signals from within it, and outreach is triggered by what’s happening in the customer’s world, not just in yours.

This requires a different kind of tooling and a different organizational mindset. Most CS platforms, even sophisticated ones, haven’t been built this way. Their underlying data models are still centered on the vendor relationship, with AI layered on top to summarize or generate templates.

The difference matters at scale. Static models become stale. Customers change faster than CS teams can update their playbooks. And by the time the lag shows up in your health score, you are already in a reactive posture. You just don’t know it yet.

3 Questions Every Series C Customer Success Leader Should Ask

The path forward doesn’t start with buying new tooling. It starts with an honest audit of what your current motion is actually optimized for.

1 . Does your CS data model include anything that happens outside your product?

Not just what the customer does in your platform, but what’s happening in their business. Hiring signals. Earnings reports. Executive changes. Product launches. If the answer is no, your “proactive” motion is operating on a fraction of the relevant data.

2. Do your CSMs have any systematic way to know when a customer’s business context has shifted, before the customer tells them?

The best CS teams at Series C aren’t waiting for customers to surface problems. They’re surfacing context the customer didn’t know they needed to share.

3. Are your “proactive” outreach triggers based on what just happened, or on a model of where the customer is heading?

There’s a meaningful difference between a health score that reflects last quarter’s usage and a model that predicts next quarter’s risk. Most organizations are running the former and calling it the latter.

The Customer Success Practices That Look Proactive But Aren’t

The habits that need to change aren’t only about tooling. They show up in daily practice: QBRs built around metrics that matter to you rather than to your customer, outreach cadences that only accelerate when a renewal is 30 days out, CS teams positioned primarily as a buffer between customers and support queues. These aren’t fringe behaviors. They’re industry defaults, and they share the same underlying logic: the system is oriented around what’s easy to track inside your own ecosystem, not what actually predicts whether a customer renews.

That’s not a criticism of the teams running these motion. It’s the natural output of a category built around vendor workflows rather than customer realities. The tooling caught up to the relationship layer of CS years ago.

The intelligence layer (the part that models what’s happening in a customer’s world, not just in your product) is exactly what MineMe was built to solve.

The CS leaders who close that gap first won’t just see lower churn. They’ll find themselves having fundamentally different conversations: not “here’s how you’ve been using the product this quarter,” but “here’s what we noticed in your business, and here’s how we can help.” That shift changes the entire nature of the relationship.

A team that monitors your product usage is a vendor. A team that watches your world is something much closer to a strategic partner.

And for Archana Somasegar, the real goal was never purely defensive to begin with. “NRR is an exceptional metric,” she says. “You want to reach your churn goals, but importantly, growth opportunity is critical.” A CS org built to earn that growth isn’t built on better dashboards. It’s built on paying attention to the right world.

Insights by Archana Somasegar

Archana Somasegar is the founder of MineMe, an AI-native customer intelligence platform that combines real-time external signals (funding rounds, executive hires, product launches) with CRM data to predict next-best actions and surface expansion and retention opportunities for customer-facing teams.

About the author

Lidia Vijga

Lidia Vijga is a content engineer focused on building in-house growth engines and training AI agents that help companies scale content and dominate brand visibility across traditional and AI search. She is also co-founder of DeckLinks, bringing firsthand founder experience in building and scaling technology products.

The post Why Proactive Customer Success Keeps Failing at Series C appeared first on BYVI.

If you’re gearing up to raise a seed round in 2026, the playbook has changed. At a recent Startup Grind panel, a group of seed investors spelled out exactly what they’re looking for — and what’s getting founders passed over. Here’s what you need to know.

The bar has moved: come with traction, not just an idea

The cost to build has collapsed. AI tools mean a motivated founder can ship a working product in weeks, not months. Investors know this, and they’ve adjusted their expectations accordingly.

“The cost to build is almost zero these days”

That means showing up to a seed meeting with nothing but a deck and a vision is increasingly not enough. Investors now expect a working prototype at minimum — and if you have early customers, even better.

One investor pointed to a portfolio company called Nectar Social, an AI platform for community management, as an example of the new standard: they raised their seed round with a working product and actual paying customers already on board.

The market is both flush with cash and brutally concentrated

There’s a strange tension in seed markets right now. Capital is abundant — “tons of money in the system,” as one investor put it — but it’s flowing to a smaller and smaller number of companies. A handful of AI startups are vacuuming up enormous rounds, while the rest of the market fights for scraps.

One investor described this openly: “It’s a hard environment to be in where this much money is being concentrated in so few companies.” They also noted that early venture — the art of backing founders before outcomes are obvious — is getting squeezed out as the market turns more transactional.

The best investors still want to fund before things are known. That window exists. But it’s just narrowing.

What investors are actually looking for in founders

Credentials, pedigree, and even age matter far less than people assume. What investors are actually reading for is a specific set of signals.

A life mission, not just a startup idea

The bar isn’t “I have a good idea.” It’s “I am the person who was always going to build this.” Investors are betting on a 10–12 year relationship, and they need to believe the founder will survive the emotional ride that entails.

“If you have a vision and you feel so clear in your heart, in your gut that this is what is your life mission,” one investor said, “and you can articulate it and actually find the investor that sees it with you and can be your partner on this journey — I think it’s fascinating.” What they’re looking for is a missionary, not a mercenary.

Is there a real “why” behind what you’re building? That’s the question they’re asking themselves as you pitch.

Boldness and a contrarian point of view

Safe ideas don’t produce outlier returns, and investors know it. They’re drawn to founders who hold views that feel a little uncomfortable — people willing to bet on a future most haven’t seen yet. Being bold doesn’t mean being reckless; it means being willing to articulate a conviction clearly even when the room isn’t sure yet.

The ability to build and sell

One investor put it plainly: “The first thing I look for is: can you build and can you sell?” These are often treated as separate skill sets that get split across a founding team, but at the earliest stage, investors want to see that the lead founder can do both — or at least credibly lead both.

The selling piece matters especially for storytelling. “That narrative is so critical,” one panelist said, “because it defines how you’re going to hire people you shouldn’t have any business hiring, how you’re going to get funding you shouldn’t have any business getting, and how you win your first customers.” A founder who can build but can’t tell the story is leaving enormous leverage on the table.

Hands-on involvement in the product

The panel was clear: investors want founders who do the work, not just manage the people who do. They’re watching for the founder who is in the product details day in and day out, setting the standard by example rather than delegating from a distance.

One investor described an Uber leader as the model: deeply embedded in product decisions, going to Singapore to interview an intern to understand local market needs firsthand, still working alongside the team at midnight. That kind of operational presence signals both genuine commitment and the self-awareness to know where value actually gets created.

Relentlessness and speed, at any age

“That relentlessness, that speed” — one panelist repeated this phrase as if it’s the filter everything else runs through. The good news: this is a mindset trait, not a demographic one.

The panel was explicit that great founders come from all age groups. Younger founders tend to be more technical and carry fewer preconceived notions — which is part of why the panel sees a “renaissance of weird products” as building gets easier. But older founders are also coming off the sidelines in this moment, and investors welcome that. What they’re evaluating is drive and mental agility.

Consistent follow-through over time

A great first pitch is table stakes. What actually builds investor conviction is a pattern of doing what you said you’d do.

One investor described being a fan of founder updates for exactly this reason: “Meeting the same person multiple times and saying ‘I’m going to do a thing,’ and then you show up the next time and you did that thing — plus more.” If you’re building investor relationships before your raise, treat every interaction as a chance to demonstrate follow-through. It compounds.

A culture of relentlessness built around the mission

Finally, investors are looking at the team you’re assembling, not just you. Are the people around you bought into the mission? Do they want to win, or are they just taking a paycheck?

“You need to build a culture of relentlessness around hiring the right people that are really bought into the mission and really want to win,” one investor said. This ties directly to how you lead — whether intensity in your company comes from inspiration or from pressure. Investors can usually tell the difference.

Narrative is a competitive weapon

In a crowded market, your story is your differentiation. One investor described seeing five companies pitching in the same space, and then a sixth walked in with a completely different quality of insight: “They told the story in such an authentic way that they have an insight of what’s coming in the short term and what they see in the long term.”

Investors want to fund the company that will be big in three to five years, not the best version of what exists today. “We’re not looking for the incremental sixth player, even if the market’s very big,” one investor said. They’re looking for founders with a genuine, forward-looking viewpoint — not just pattern-matching on what’s already working.

On valuations: don’t optimize for the highest number

Seed valuations in AI are at all-time highs right now. The panel was clear: that’s a trap.

“You cannot optimize for the biggest valuation,” one investor said. The logic is simple — whatever you raise at, you have to grow into. Take an inflated seed valuation, and you’ve set a high bar for your Series A at a time when “if there is a correction, it can be very brutal.”

More importantly: the right investor is worth far more than a few extra million on the cap sheet. Choose partners who will actually help you, who believe in what you’re building, and who will be useful in hard moments.

On hustle culture: intensity from mission, not mandate

The panel pushed back firmly on the idea that founders need to work themselves into the ground. “996 is the output of culture, not the input point,” one investor said.

The key distinction: intensity that comes from believing in the mission is valuable and sustainable. Intensity that comes from mandated hours is neither. As one investor put it, “If AI is supposed to make you so much more productive, you don’t necessarily need to work like you’re burning out.”

Build a team that genuinely wants to win — not one that’s grinding out of fear. That’s the culture investors want to see.

The bottom line

The 2026 seed market rewards founders who show up with evidence: a product that works, a life mission, a narrative about the future that’s original, and a track record of doing what they said they would. The money is there. The bar is just higher, and the competition for the best investors is fierce.

The investors on this panel were clear: they’re still excited to back people before outcomes are certain. But they need to see enough signal to believe you’re the one.

About the Author

Lidia Vijga

Lidia Vijga is a content engineer focused on building in-house growth engines and training AI agents that help companies scale content and dominate brand visibility across traditional and AI search. She is also co-founder of DeckLinks, bringing firsthand founder experience in building and scaling technology products.

The post Seed Fundraising in 2026: The Real Reasons VCs Fund or Pass appeared first on BYVI.

Every CMO I know has the same private suspicion right now: the things that used to be hard are getting cheap, the things that used to differentiate are getting commoditized, and the only thing that still feels defensible is the way customers feel about you. A recent Startup Grind panel — featuring marketing leaders from Figma, Vanta, Brex and beyond — landed on the same conclusion from five different angles.

Brand is what people feel you stand for — not what you ship

The most quoted line of the night may also be the simplest: “At the end of the day, your users, your community and the people who love your product want to know what you stand for.”

Copy can be copied. Features will be replicated by a model in 3 weeks. The emotional and values-based residue your company leaves behind — what one panelist called the “beyond product functionality” layer — is the only asset that doesn’t get cloned.

For marketing leaders, the implication is uncomfortable: a lot of what counts as “marketing output” right now contributes nothing to that residue. It generates impressions and timeline real estate while leaving the underlying brand exactly where it was.

The launch treadmill is a vanity metric

The panel was especially blunt about shipping cadence. “It’s a trap to fall into the launch treadmill because it makes you feel very active if you’re producing all these artifacts,” said one speaker. “People like your posts on LinkedIn and Twitter. But the reality is it’s really meaningfully shifting whether customers are adopting, using, engaging deeply with your product.”

Frequent launches feel like progress because they look like progress. Internally, they fill review meetings; externally, they get reposts. But the metric that matters — does this change how deeply customers use the thing — is rarely the metric being optimized. Worse, teams slip into “a binary, we launched it, we’re done kind of mentality and then onto the next,” which severs the marketing function from the actual adoption curve.

The fix is counterintuitive in an industry built on momentum: launch less, bundle more, and let the timing serve the story. “What you do could mean pushing back a launch, collapsing launches together so you have a bigger moment, telling the more thematic bundle.” A thematic moment that lands is worth 10 “launches” that scroll past.

A caveat about pace: don’t read OpenAI’s cadence as a benchmark. As one panelist explained, “the big labs, you’re building from model capabilities forward” — they ship because their job is to educate the world about what models can now do. Product companies “shift from customer needs backwards,” which is a fundamentally different game. Importing the frontier-lab tempo into a vertical SaaS company is cargo-cult marketing.

Pick your enemy, not your competitor

Brand is sharpened by what it’s against. But the panel was careful to distinguish picking an enemy from picking a fight.

For early-stage companies, the most productive enemy is usually the status quo itself. “For us, our first enemy was a taxi, not Lyft,” said the Uber alum on the panel. That framing did something a competitor jab could not: it told users what kind of world the company believed in. Taxis weren’t another app; they were a daily indignity. Naming the indignity gave Uber a meaning beyond the product.

For more established companies, going after a much larger incumbent remains the safest, highest-leverage play. Scott from Brex described the famous Concur campaign: “We turned their name into a curse word, Concur…rrrgh!. And when you have a competitor that’s significantly larger, it’s a very safe bet and a great way to get more mind share if you go with them.”

Anthropic’s Super Bowl spot aimed at OpenAI was, in his read, the same playbook scaled up — “incredibly unexpected and because of that was one of the most bold things I’ve seen.”

The harder question is what to do with rising peers. The traditional answer is to ignore them and refuse to lend them legitimacy. That instinct is being rewritten. “The prevailing wisdom is to do nothing there and not recognize them,” Scott said, “and my prediction is you’re going to see more of [direct rivalry] because markets are getting some more competitive.” Harvey vs. Legora is the current poster child: “The fight becomes the story and it elevates both of the projects.”

A warning, though: this only works from a position of clarity. “You have to come at it from a position of confidence and clarity about your why and what you stand for,” said Figma’s speaker, who pointed to the company’s own decade-long stance — advocacy for design as a discipline — as the anchor that lets sharper messaging work. Without that anchor, “done wrong, it can have really negative repercussions on your brand.”

Build the marketing team your funnel actually needs

The most useful operational thread of the night was on hiring. The panel pushed back on the default reflex of “we need a head of marketing” with a more diagnostic frame: hire to the bottleneck.

In this era, the most contested hire is product marketing.

“Product marketing is probably one of the most sought-after hires right now,” and for good reason: the central job is to “figure out your why — what makes you different, what makes you differentiated in the market. That, I think, is the north star of this current time and era.”

When every competitor can ship the same feature in a quarter, the team that can articulate why their version matters wins.

Two practical updates to the old org chart are worth flagging.

First, the disciplines are blending. “With the aid of AI, it’s much easier to flex into demand generation or into brand storytelling,” and a strong product marketer can now read a demand-gen dashboard without a translator. The cycle from idea to execution has collapsed — “you can go from idea to execution in a much shorter cycle time than before” — because the ad ops, design, and analytics layers that used to require entire teams can now be carried by one operator. Expect more from each hire, but expect to need fewer of them.

Second, the founder is part of the marketing team whether they like it or not. The panel was unanimous that the best founders “intuitively care about brand and communications and how you tell a story.” When that’s true, the first hire can be a growth marketer rather than a narrative one — the founder is already carrying the narrative. When it’s not, product marketing has to come first, because nothing the rest of the team builds will compound without a sharp answer to “what are we, and what are we against.”

The pricing pendulum hasn’t landed yet

A short detour on pricing, because every CMO is being asked about it. The fashionable claim that “per-seat is over” is, in the panel’s read, overblown. Consumption pricing is real and rising, but it carries its own friction: high cognitive load for users trying to value individual tasks, and runaway-spend anxiety from buyers who answer to a CFO. The pendulum will swing back. The likely steady state is a hybrid — consumption bucketed into predictable tiers, with thresholds that trigger upgrades rather than running counters that trigger panic.

A test you can run yourself

The most operational takeaway from the panel was also the most testable. Quiz every person in your company on two questions:

1. Who are we building for
2. How are we different

If everyone answers the same way, you’ve won 75% of the battle.

Most companies won’t pass. The fix is not a brand refresh. It’s writing down — in the founder’s voice, not the agency’s — a half-page of prose that backs up the positioning, and then making sure the website headline reflects it without jargon.

“Memorialize your vision beyond your head,” the panel said, because if it only lives in the founder’s head, the company has no brand asset at all.

Today, that half-page may be the most valuable thing the marketing team owns. Product gets copied. Pricing gets matched. But the story — the one your team tells with conviction, in your founder’s own voice — is yours alone. And that’s the moat.

About the Author

Lidia Vijga

Lidia Vijga is a content engineer focused on building in-house growth engines and training AI agents that help companies scale content and dominate brand visibility across traditional and AI search. She is also co-founder of DeckLinks, bringing firsthand founder experience in building and scaling technology products.

The post Brand Marketing: The Only Moat Left Is How You Make People Feel appeared first on BYVI.