👋 Hey — Egemen here.
Vibes and a pitch deck do not work anymore.
I am sharing my three exact moves to raise pre-seed capital in a market that is aggressively sorting us out.
Here’s a snapshot of what’s on the menu today:
💡 Spotlight: Rehearse your audience. Decide with conviction.
🧠 Deep-Dive: The Pre-Seed Barbell
🗺️ Method: One AI Coworker
⚾️ Catch: Paul Erdos Problem
☝️ Scaled This Past Week: Farther
💡 Spotlight: Rehearse your audience. Decide with conviction.
Introducing Concept Testing by Articos.
Before your next email, landing page, or value prop goes live — run it against a synthetic version of your exact ICP first.
See what resonates.
Spot what's confusing.
Fix what's missing.
All before you publish a word or spend a dollar. 86% accuracy.
No recruiting. No waiting weeks.
🧠 Deep-Dive: The Pre-Seed Barbell
41.7% of all Seed capital now goes to AI startups!
US startups raised $10.4B across 50,316 instruments in 2025. That's a 1% decline in dollars but a 13% drop in deal count.
Same money, fewer companies. The pool isn't drying up. It's getting concentrated.
The concentration has a direction. AI captures 41.7% of all seed capital. Add geography: 66% of top-decile seed valuations land in the Bay Area (44%) or New York (22%).
If you're a non-AI founder building outside those two metros, you're competing for what's left.
Three moves if you're raising in 2026.
Stop benchmarking against medians. They hide concentration. Look at percentiles in your segment and geography.
Right-size the round. Your relevant comp is the $7.5M cap on a sub-$250K round, or the $15M cap on a $1-2.5M round. Going higher tells investors you don't know the market.
Build proof before the raise. The bar moved. Pick the proof relevant to your stage and bring it to the meeting. Vibes and a deck don't clear it anymore.
👉 The pre-seed market isn't shrinking. It's sorting. If you're not AI or coastal, your bar is higher, your raise is smaller, and your proof has to be louder.
🗺️ Method
Your inventory doesn't wait for you to check a dashboard.
Viktor sends daily inventory and reorder alerts to your team's Slack channel. If a SKU is trending toward stockout, you know before it happens.
Your content calendar and social posting run on autopilot. Brand monitoring runs in the background. Viktor handles the recurring work across ops and marketing so your team focuses on growth.
5,700+ teams. 3,000+ integrations.
⚾️ Catch: Paul Erdos Problem
OpenAI just shared something pretty wild.
One of their AI models helped disprove a math idea that had been around since 1946, which is a big moment for how AI can support real research.
☝️ Scaled This Past Week
Farther closed a $150M Series D on May 21 - it’s the scale of the week!
Farther rebuilt what big advisory firms run on. Most incumbents stitch together separate CRMs, custodial platforms, planning tools, and reporting systems that don't talk to each other.
Farther runs one integrated platform that handles client management, portfolio construction, and real-time reporting in a single environment.