Some tips for raising money in 2025

As a journalist turned investor, one of my absolute favorite ways to spend my time is to get deep with founders as they kick off a capital raise. Creating materials, including decks, memos, and a data room, can take a very long time. Not to mention the pitch prep, the investor target lists, and all the meetings. I’ve been a coach to a group of founders going through this process - and in most cases, it’s a grind.

So I asked one of our regular contributors — 7wireVentures’ Alyssa Jaffee, to share a shortlist of tips for founders embarking on a raise. And I added a few of my own, which are specific to 2025. I am wary of making predictions, but what I’ve heard from my network is that pre-seed and seed activity is going strong in health tech (especially for AI), while the hardest rounds to raise are at the Series B and C. I think of this as the “post Product Market Fit” stage of the business, but well before it’s a growth-stage round, and the bulk of the diligence will be done on Excel. At the B and C, it’s still imperative that the investor be a true believer in the business because the numbers will rarely speak for themselves.

Bottom line: Anything without AI that’s more services-oriented will need to find the right fit in the venture capital world. There are certainly still a lot of investors who can get behind these businesses, but there’s more discipline now than ever before about valuation. These companies should not be valued like software businesses because they’re not.