👋 Hey, Egemen here.
I have been reading the wrong line, and I suspect most of us have.
Every quarterly summary I write opens with capital deployed, because that is the number the reports put first.
Capital deployed measures how much money sits in the market. Instrument count decides whether you raise.
Those two lines split apart this year.
Here’s a snapshot of what’s on the menu today:
💡 Spotlight: AI tools without the technical pain
🧠 Deep-Dive: Fundraising changed
🗺️ Method: The one-page usage proof
⚾️ Catch: Find the perfect marketing agencies in <15 mins
☝️ Scaled This Past Week: Vals AI
💡 Spotlight: AI tools without the technical pain
The hardest part of AI isn't finding tools. It's getting them to work.
Taku helps people discover proven AI tools, and turn them into reusable workflows. Taku is an AI desktop workspace where you can:
AI apps, agents, skills, and workflows - without getting stuck in Github, dependencies, environment setup or deployment.
To celebrate their beta launch, Taku are rewarding their first users:
First 300 users
🎁 Starter Plan — First month free
Users 301–1000
🎁 Starter Plan — 50% off first month
🧠 Deep-Dive: 22% of pre-seed checks vanished
According to the State of Pre-Seed for Q2 2026 report here, US startups raised $3.19B across more than 11,500 pre-seed instruments.
A year ago it was $3.22B across 14,825.
Dollars moved less than 1%.
Deal count fell 22%.
The average pre-seed instrument hit $276,000 in Q2, up 27% year over year and the highest Carta has logged in more than four years.
Investors did not turn generous all of sudden of course. The same pool of money landed on around 3,300 fewer cap tables. Carta revises these counts upward as more data lands, so treat 22% as the ceiling on the decline rather than the final read.
It also looks like the AI label will not rescue you either. AI is at the top 49% of pre-seed dollars in H1 2026 against 50% for all of 2025.
That share stopped climbing after rising every year since 2021. Calling yourself an AI company now buys parity with everyone else in the queue.
Your fundraising job changed shape.
Pushing for a higher cap wins a better number on a document that fewer people can sign. The constraint that moved is who still holds deployable capital, so build the list around that.
👉 So before you send one more deck, check when every fund on your list last closed a fund. A 2021 VC sitting on its final 15% will take the meeting and never wire.
🗺️ Method: The one-page usage proof
The “AI startup” label now buys parity. Evidence moves you up the queue.
So pull four numbers straight out of your product and put them on one page. It takes an afternoon.
Run it this week. If most signups never reach the action, or the week-four cohort empties out, fix the product before you book a single investor call.
A raise will not repair a number that was never there.
⚾️ Catch
Find the perfect marketing agencies in <15 minutes
You hire an agency every couple of years. We do it every day.
Tell us your budget and what you need
Our experts shortlist from agencies we've already vetted
You get 3 or 4 agencies worth your time
It costs nothing and <7 days
☝️ Scaled This Past Week: Vals AI
Vals AI closed a $40 million Series A - it’s the scale of the week!
Vals AI grades frontier AI models on real professional work.
The team turns tasks that lawyers, financial analysts, engineers and clinicians actually perform into benchmarks, then scores model output against an expert standard. Enterprises use the results to pick a model.