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Hope everyone had a relaxing holiday season! One week of 2026 in the books, and it feels like it's going to be a transformational year for the startup ecosystem generally and the finance world in particular. One of my resolutions for the new year is settling into a consistent biweekly publishing schedule. To start off the year, I dove into Carta's 2025 'State of Startups' report to read the tea leaves on the 2026 fundraising landscape. I'd love to hear from you: what other trends / open questions are you most interested in exploring in 2026? |
| 💡 'AI Vertigo': Tips for Fundraising in 2026 |
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Carta's monster 145 page presentation on the state of startups in 2025 tells a story of an industry in the middle of a seismic shift. Smaller teams are shipping faster, Series A is becoming a brutal gauntlet, and nearly half of all US venture capital is flowing into AI. The old playbooks are being torn up in real time, and founders still operating on pre-2023 assumptions are setting themselves up for failure. The through-line is, unsurprisingly, AI. These tools are simultaneously making it easier than ever to launch a startup, and making it harder than ever to get funded. It's all a bit disorienting: call it AI Vertigo. Here's my best attempt at making sense of the data and offering some guidance for founders heading into 2026. Read the full article. |
| 🫀 The Ecosystem Pulse |
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2025 SaaS Benchmarks Report by High Alpha Every company founded in 2025 is building with AI at the core of its product. In 2026, we're going back to basics: teams that can most effectively leverage AI to build more valuable products will be the winners. Everyone is building with the same tools; this year we'll start to see the well-run companies pull away from the pack. OnlyCFO AI Use Cases in Finance Finance continues to lag other departments when it comes to AI implementation, and for good reason: 'black box AI' is not acceptable when it comes to closing your books & reporting to the board. AI can help around the margins, but for now it should be used with caution & with a human expert in the loop. David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z David George has been very vocal about a trend that I'm following closely in 2026: a reevaluation of the traditional metrics by which startup traction gets measured. It may be a controversial headline, but there's an underlying nuance to his argument. Investors should not confuse high margins with strong defensibility. Yes, margins do matter, but only to the extent they truly signify that a startup has built a defensible moat. |
| 🤝 airCFO Content Connection | ||
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That's all for this edition of The AI CFO - we'll be back in your inbox every other week with more musings on the future of AI-powered finance & operations. Please reply to this email directly with any feedback/suggestions/just to say hi! Cheers, Alex Wittenberg, CEO @ airCFO |
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