The early stage fundraising conversation right now is dominated by talk of tighter conditions and scarcer capital. Strip out AI from the European venture numbers and the non-AI market is actually shrinking – deal volume fell 40% year-over-year in Q1 2026, even as the headline figures told a rosier story.
But that focus on traditional measures misses something important. How much capital is actually needed at the start of a startup’s journey. After more than two decades in the ecosystem, I’m witnessing the most dramatic change in the quality and capital-efficiency of the businesses now coming through the door.
The cost of building a company from scratch has fallen dramatically, and the implications are more profound than most people realise.
Build it yourself, fund it smarter
Looking through old pitches on the Angel Investment Network (AIN) platform recently, I was surprised by just how much things had changed in terms of what founders needed money for.
Take ecommerce as one example. Twenty years ago, getting a transactional website off the ground with payments, fulfilment and basic infrastructure meant spending north of €100k before selling a single product.
Today, Shopify and third-party logistics providers have made that near-free. The same compression has happened across almost every function a founder needs.
I recently spoke with a founder who launched a DTC brand from her kitchen table for under €2k, using Shopify for the storefront and a 3PL for shipping. Five years ago that same setup would have required significant funding and time.
Building a basic MVP app no longer requires a development team; no-code platforms handle that with ‘vibe coding’ becoming a key part of the tech lexicon and Collins Dictionary Word of the year last year, despite the term only being coined in February 2025. Brand identity that once needed a €10k agency retainer can be assembled through tools like Looka or Canva’s brand kits.
Marketing has shifted too. Personalisation tools built into Meta and Google mean a founder with commercial instinct can run targeted campaigns that previously required expensive agency support. Even pitch preparation, once a secretive art passed down through accelerator cohorts, has been democratised through freely available templates and frameworks.
Looking at the decks we saw from even 10 years ago, the standard of materials has improved beyond recognition. Founders are arriving with polished decks, more developed products, validated metrics, and a clear understanding of their unit economics, previously only possible for advanced businesses, with full teams of experts.
The founders coming into investor discussions today are better prepared and carry more traction than their predecessors did at equivalent stages.
The agentic workforce
AI and agentic workflows represent the newest and potentially most significant layer in this story. Tasks that once needed a dedicated hire can now be handled by AI agents. From customer support triage, first-pass copywriting, data analysis, scheduling, basic coding, bookkeeping. The list grows every quarter. Teams of two or three are executing at a level that previously required ten, and that ratio is only going to widen.
Founders are already building entire product lines with skeleton crews, using AI to handle operational tasks while they focus on the strategic decisions that actually require a human.
The startup that would have needed a €500k Seed round to hire its first five employees can now reach the same milestones with a fraction of that, keeping its burn low and its equity intact.
The full impact is still being understood, but the direction is clear. Founders who lean into these tools early will pull ahead, and that advantage grows over time. Every month the capabilities expand, and the gap between those who adopt and those who don’t gets harder to close.
Since the cost of reaching proof of concept has fallen so dramatically for many businesses, the friends-and-family round can now take a startup much further than before. Founders are arriving at pre-Seed and Seed funding rounds with the traction that previous generations only had at Series A.
Early-stage capital goes further, dilution can be lower, and the era of raising large rounds simply to cover basic infrastructure costs may be coming to a rapid end.
Why the founder matters more than ever
In early stage investment, it has always been as much about the person as the product, but the balance is likely to be now tilted ever further toward the who not the what.
Relevant experience, the ability to win people over, operational discipline with lean teams, genuine innovation, and adaptability. These are the qualities that create real credibility and confidence when everything else is roughly equal. A polished deck and a functional prototype are no longer signals of capability. They are table stakes.
The question is then can this founder make the hard decisions well, and do they understand their market deeply enough to build something lasting?
Nina van Schaick, founder of Peripear and winner of a Female Founders pitch competition that AIN recently judged, spent 14 years as a midwife before building a medical device to prevent birth injuries. She had no engineering background, but that clinical experience meant she could speak the language of hospital procurement teams from Houston to Singapore and build something that works in practice, not just in theory.
When the tools are available to everyone, the advantage goes to whoever understands the problem best.
Startups entering the ecosystem today are stronger, leaner and better prepared than at any point in the past two decades. When the barriers to developing a business fall away, what remains is the founder.
In many respects, if you know what you’re doing, this is one of the best times in history to build.
