Good companies should get funded.
By Jake Ellowitz & Alex Chee
That sentence shouldn’t be controversial. And yet the modern venture market has quietly decided otherwise. If your company isn’t the trade of the moment, you can have product-market fit, real revenue, healthy unit economics — and still be told the round isn’t there.
Venture capital spent the last decade manufacturing a record class of mid- and late-stage companies. It got them to adolescence — and then, right as they should be compounding into their best years, abandoned them. ForceMultiple exists because that math is broken, and the founders living inside it deserve a different option.
Venture capital walked away from the companies it created. That's why we're stepping up.
Venture is supposed to fund novel ideas. In practice, it follows narratives. Today the entire industry is crowding into one trade, and everything outside it is being rationed — regardless of how good the underlying business is.
After working with thousands of founders through Termina, the pattern is impossible to miss: the companies getting starved aren’t weak companies. They’re companies with PMF and working unit economics whose only “flaw” is being out of fashion. The market built them, took credit for them, and then quietly stopped showing up to the next round.
Since 2023, mid- and late-stage funding for non-AI companies in the US has collapsed from roughly $200B to $60B, while AI capital has gone vertical. More than 4,000 mid- and late-stage non-AI companies are now fighting for a shrinking pool — an estimated $50B per year funding gap, most of which would have gone straight into growth.
This isn’t a soft patch. It’s a generation of good companies being left to stall out in plain sight.
Source: Crunchbase and ForceMultiple analysis.
Capital hits above its weight when revenue is ready to scale.
For a company with PMF, the biggest ongoing use of capital isn’t R&D or capex. It’s GTM. And GTM has a brutal shape: you spend today, you collect months later. That trough is where companies are quietly being broken.
Equity to fund that trough is scarce and punitive — when it’s available at all. Other funding sources — traditional debt, revolvers, ARR lines — paper over part of the gap, but they’re built on fixed repayment schedules that have nothing to do with how cohorts actually pay back. Founders take them and then live with a Sword of Damocles: a covenant, a maturity, a margin call waiting for a bad quarter.
So founders cut growth to protect the balance sheet. They run the business at an artificially low ceiling. The company doesn’t fail — it just never becomes what it was supposed to be. That, more than anything, is the failing of the current market.
Capital should behave like a partner, not a landlord.
ForceMultiple invests in your GTM motion on an ongoing basis and ties itself to the outcome. We invest when you invest. We get paid when you get paid. If a cohort underperforms, we eat that with you — not the other way around.
Instead of forcing a dilutive round or stacking restrictive debt, we provide capital that is:
- Scalable. Capital flexes month to month with cohort performance — no lumpy rounds, no renegotiation as you grow from seven into eight and nine figures.
- Non-dilutive and non-recourse. Founders keep ownership and keep optionality. If a cohort underperforms, that risk sits with us — no covenants, no forced cash outflows.
- Cohort-aligned. We invest when you invest and get paid when you get paid. Repayment tracks realized customer collections, not an arbitrary calendar.
It’s capital shaped like the way modern companies actually grow — scalable, cohort-aligned, and built to sit alongside the rest of your stack instead of competing with it.
ForceMultiple is live.
There is a generation of companies with real businesses, real customers, and real growth being told to wait their turn. We don’t think they should have to.
If you’re running one of them — let’s talk.