AI-native companies are raising at growth rates that make the old SaaS benchmarks look slow, and investors are pricing them accordingly. At the same time, companies with real revenue and strong retention are struggling to get a term sheet. Two years ago, the same numbers would have sailed through a raise.

At a recent F Suite panel discussion between Andrew Boston (Partner, Founders Circle Capital), Seema Amble (Partner, Andreessen Horowitz), and Amol Hardikar (SVP of Finance, Upbound), the split was described as living in either "a golden city of AI" or trying to avoid "a Dickensian downtown," with the gap between the two only growing.

Unfortunately, CFOs don't control which side of that split their company falls on. You can't manufacture an AI-native growth curve just because investors are rewarding one right now.

What determines your ability to raise capital in 2026 and 2027 is whether the story behind your numbers holds up once an investor starts poking at it.

1. Ensure You Have a Real AI Story

Every company raising capital right now has an AI story. Investors have gotten much better at telling which ones are real.

"It has to look genuine. You can't just tell someone to plug in AI and call it their new business model. It has to be genuine." — Seema Amble, Partner, Andreessen Horowitz

Look through the companies that went public over the last 12 months. Many have fallen flat in their debuts because their business models weren’t able to withstand AI developments and disruption.

There are two ways to think about the authenticity of your AI story:

• Whether the shift already happened operationally. Companies that changed how they build and sell internally before making noise about it have an easier time telling the AI story credibly, because the story just describes what already occurred. Visible AI positioning — what one panelist called "the AI glow up" — helps a fundraising narrative, but on its own it doesn't close the gap between a company that's genuinely AI-native and one that's just dressed to look that way.

• Whether the pricing matches how the customer actually buys. Consumption-based AI pricing has become common across software, but it only works if the customer is operating that way. A company selling to Fortune 500 logos that still run infrastructure on-prem can't charge by AI usage and expect it to land — the model means nothing to a buyer who isn't set up for it.

Investors and customers are both looking for signals like these now.

2. Build Reporting Rigor to Survive Increased Investor Scrutiny

The past year produced a wave of new revenue definitions — annualizing a single strong month of usage, counting deals as closed before they are, blending metrics until growth looks faster than it is. Most of that pressure comes from founders reading the market, from other investors, from anyone trying to keep pace with what everyone else claims to be growing at. None of those people have to defend the number afterward.

It's rarely malicious. It's usually smart people responding to competitive pressure and matching whatever the market currently rewards. But when a board looks for someone to vouch for a number, that's a finance job, not a founder's.

When investors come in for diligence, they’ll run their own math on the numbers. They’ll notice:

• Monthly consumption turned into annualized revenue reporting

• Wild swings in month-to-month consumption smoothed out in trends

• Snapshot retention numbers that look great (120%+) but are less impressive (<100%) on a three-month average

Don’t treat reporting as an effort to mask deficiencies in the AI story or your numbers. Share the true cost and build a narrative around it. You’ll be in a better position for the raise by instilling investor confidence early rather than creating a surface-level story.

3. Understand Your True Margins

GAAP gross margin and the number investors actually underwrite are often two different figures once AI costs enter the picture. Some companies push token and compute costs below the line as marketing spend, which keeps gross margin looking clean on paper.

Real diligence adds those costs back into COGS and recalculates from there. A free tier still costs real money to run, regardless of where it sits on the income statement. That's part of why contribution margin has become the more honest lens on which companies are actually executing well.

"It's always easier to move a positive margin up or down than to climb out of a huge loss position." — Amol Hardikar, Chief Financial Officer, Upbound

Companies that grow fast on negative gross margin and still produce an exciting outcome exist, but that's "rarefied air," not a template most businesses can copy. For most companies, margin discipline is what keeps a fundraise, an acquisition, and staying private all open as options at once.

Within the next 9 to 12 months, several AI-native companies are expected to go public, Anthropic and SpaceX among them, and the market will get its clearest look yet at what their margins actually are once the compute costs are counted honestly.

What to Do If You’re Not in the AI Fast Lane

Capital right now is concentrated in a small number of AI-native names, and growth funds that used to make room for "less exciting" but solid businesses at 3x to 5x returns are increasingly chasing the same 20 or so companies everyone else wants in on.

That concentration should ease as some of those companies eventually go public and free up capital elsewhere, but until it does, a strong non-AI business competes for a smaller pool than it would have two years ago.

That doesn't mean the answer is to wait it out. A few things hold up regardless of which side of the divide a company is on:

• Move toward profitability as the plan, not as a backup. Companies without AI-native growth are increasingly building toward profitability earlier rather than assuming another round will be there when they need it. A company on a path to breakeven can still raise opportunistically. One that's counting on the next round to survive is negotiating from a much weaker position.

• Debt becomes a real option as breakeven gets closer. Cheap debt is increasingly available to companies approaching profitability, and it funds growth without another round of dilution.

• Expect a wider net than growth alone would suggest. A company at $20 million ARR growing three times year-over-year, with large, sticky logos, is still a fundamentally sound business. It's also increasingly likely to need 60 to 70 investor conversations to close a round that might once have taken 15. That's a function of where the capital is concentrated, not a signal that the fundamentals are wrong.

Whether a company is posting AI-native growth or building toward profitability the slower way, what gets a deal done is the same thing: a story and a set of numbers that hold up once someone starts asking hard questions about them.

If you want to work through what that looks like for your own fundraise with CFOs who are navigating the same market, join The F Suite as a member.