👋 Hey — Egemen here (started using my dormant X account after 2 years, give me a follow, I share more there).
I keep seeing the same headline everywhere: "$297 billion in startup funding in one quarter." Record-shattering. Historic. Golden age.
I don't buy it. Not for founders like us.
Here’s a snapshot of what’s on the menu today:
💡 Spotlight: User research is broken and it's costing you sprints
🧠 Deep-Dive: What Q1 2026 Funding Actually Means for Seed Founders
🗺️ Method: Build 30+ landing pages with 0 dev effort
⚾️ Catch: 3000+ AI Tools, 500+ Prompts
☝️ Scaled This Past Week: GitButler
💡 Spotlight: User research is broken and it's costing you sprints
Most teams are making product decisions on gut feel. Not because they want to. Because real research takes 4–6 weeks, $1,500+, and a calendar full of no-shows.
Articos fixes that.
It's an AI research platform that runs synthetic user interviews and A/B message tests in under 30 minutes — no recruitment, no scheduling, no waiting.
What Articos does:
→ User Interviews — Brief your research goal, define your target persona, and Articos conducts the interviews. You get themes, behavioral insights, and a shareable report. Same depth as a research sprint, without touching your timeline.
→ A/B Testing — Test two versions of your copy, concept, or flow against synthetic users that reflect your ICP. Know which one lands before you ship it.
86% accuracy vs. traditional research. Brief in Friday. Clarity by Monday.
I dug into Crunchbase's Q1 2026 Global Venture Funding Report and CB Insights' State of Venture Q1'26. The number behind the number paints a completely different picture.
Four deals ate the market. OpenAI ($122B), Anthropic ($30B), xAI ($20B), and Waymo ($16B) raised $188 billion between them. That's 63% of all global venture funding from four companies. Strip those out and the rest of the market raised about $109 billion. Still decent. But not the gold rush the headlines suggest.
Look at that chart. Seed dollars are climbing. Deal count is falling off a cliff. That's not a healthy market getting richer. That's a market getting more selective. Fewer founders funded, bigger checks to the ones who get through.
The numbers are stark. Seed funding hit $12 billion in Q1 2026, up 30% year over year. But the number of seed deals dropped 31% to 3,700.
That means about 1,700 founders who would have been funded a year ago aren't getting funded now.
METRIC | Q1 2025 | Q1 2026 | CHANGE |
|---|---|---|---|
Global VC funding | ~$118B | $297B | +150% |
AI share of total funding | 55% | 81% | +26 pts |
Seed funding (global) | ~$9.2B | $12B | +30% |
Seed deal count | ~5,400 | 3,700 | -31% |
Early-stage funding | $29.4B | $40.6B | +38% |
Total deal count (global) | ~7,800 | ~6,000 | -23% |
If your AI story isn't front and center, or if you're building SaaS that doesn't fit neatly into the "AI infrastructure" bucket, you're fighting for a shrinking pool. CB Insights found that $100M+ megarounds made up 86% of all Q1 funding. That's not a typo. Most of the money went to a tiny number of very large bets.
Exits are stuck too. IPOs dropped nearly 50% quarter over quarter. Only 21 venture-backed companies globally exited above $1 billion in Q1, and 13 of those were Chinese. The secondary market (think: Stripe running structured sell-downs at a $159B valuation) is quietly becoming the real exit for top-tier companies. For everyone else, the exit horizon just got longer.
What I'd do right now. Three things matter more than they did a year ago if you're raising seed.
First: your AI angle needs to be specific. "We use AI" doesn't cut it. Investors want to know what model, what data moat, what happens when OpenAI ships a competing feature.
Second: capital efficiency is your biggest edge. When investors are making fewer bets, the founders who can show traction on less money stand out.
Third: stop benchmarking against megarounds. Your real comp set is the 3,700 seed deals that actually closed, not the $297 billion headline.
👉 $297B in a quarter sounds like a boom. For seed founders, it's a squeeze. More money chasing fewer deals, concentrated in AI, with exits stuck in limbo. The capital is there. It's just not for everyone. Build lean, tell a sharp story, and stop waiting for the market to hand you a check.
🗺️ Method
One brand built 30+ landing pages through Viktor without a single developer.
Each page mapped to a specific ad group. All deployed within hours. Viktor wrote the code and shipped every one from a Slack message.
That same team has Viktor monitoring ad accounts across the portfolio and posting performance briefs before the day starts. One colleague. Always on. Across every account.
5,700+ teams. 3,000+ integrations.
⚾️ Catch
3,000+ AI tools. 500+ prompts. Free courses. All from one newsletter.
Most AI resources are scattered, untested, or buried behind a paywall.
The Shift puts it all in one free newsletter, covering what’s new, and what practically works under 5 minutes a day.
A vault of 3,000+ vetted tools so you’re never guessing. A 500+ prompt library for every use case you’ll actually hit and free AI courses that make sure nothing stays theoretical.
Plus, right now, 3 subscribers win a free 1-year Claude Pro subscription just for signing up.
☝️ Scaled This Past Week: GitButler
GitButler has successfully raised $17 million in a Series A funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z).
GitButler is a next-generation version control client designed to streamline the developer workflow by allowing engineers to manage multiple concurrent branches of code simultaneously.
Their platform integrates deeply with existing Git tools while providing a more intuitive, visual interface that helps teams coordinate complex changes and reduce the friction of code reviews.