There are no easy answers for navigating capital markets in 2026. The AI wave continues to complicate the investment calculus in real time. Even though the capital is there, the bar for earning conviction from investors is higher than ever before.

In 2025, 63% of all venture deals went into AI startups. Valuations are swinging wildly between companies perceived as AI-native and everyone else. Investors are passing on companies they would have funded a year ago because the defensibility question has gotten harder to answer.

That was the backdrop for a recent F Suite panel, Market Outlook: Charting a Path in 2026, featuring Alok Goel (CEO & CFO, Drivetrain), Isaac Strulowitz (Partner & CFO, Treville Capital Group), and Tim Porter (Managing Director, Madrona Venture Group).

Between them, they bring perspectives from the operator seat, the fund CFO seat, and 20 years of early-stage venture investing through every major technology wave. Here's what they think finance leaders need to understand about navigating the market right now.

Understand That Revenue Quality Matters As Much as Revenue Volume

Growth rate is still the first thing investors look at. But the benchmark for what counts as strong has moved significantly, and growth alone isn't closing deals anymore.

The old triple-triple-double-double benchmarks are gone. Venture investors are now asking why you're not growing 4X, 5X, or 10X. That's the new floor for top-tier capital access. But immediately after growth rate, the question is whether that revenue actually holds.

AI has made it easier than ever to generate initial customer interest, but initial interest isn't durable revenue. What investors are stress-testing is whether customers actually stick and expand.

• "There's so much easy come, easy go revenue right now, people experimenting, especially with AI... Companies that really show that customers renew, expand, don't churn — I think that's the second biggest thing that investors are asking for." — Tim Porter, Managing Director, Madrona Venture Group

Metrics that look good on the surface are breaking deals when they can't hold up under the defensibility question. Isaac Strulowitz noted that his firm is passing on companies now that they never would have a year or two ago — "all the metrics look great, the growth looks great, but then the question is, is this something that we think can get disrupted given where the sector's headed?"

That scrutiny carries into the diligence process itself. Investors are checking whether the narrative they've been told reconciles with the data. How quickly a company responds to follow-up questions is itself a signal: a two-week turnaround suggests a primitive data stack, while a next-day response tells investors the operation is tight.

Know Where Your Business Sits on the Disruption Spectrum

One of the most consequential questions investors are asking right now is whether your business model survives the shift to agentic AI. The answer comes down to two things: what role your product plays in your customers' workflows, and how you charge for it.

What Role Does Your Product Play?

The distinction investors are drawing is between companies that own the system of record — the core data layer, the underlying workflows, the system of action — and companies whose value is tied to owning the user experience. The former have the most resilient positioning, but the latter may be exposed.

• "If you are highly dependent on owning the user experience with your customer, or a seat-based pricing model, you are really exposed. We can see the future already happening — where people interact with an AI agent, directing it to do different tasks, bring you information. You're not typing into a web browser, going into a SaaS interface, doing a bunch of different boxes and dashboards." — Tim Porter, Managing Director, Madrona Venture Group

Regardless of where things are headed long-term, the immediate focus for most companies right now is on getting data correctly ingested into their systems of record, not ripping them out. Those systems are still mission-critical, and the work happening around them is about feeding them better, not replacing them. That buys incumbents time, but it isn't a permanent shield.

How Are You Charging for It?

Traditional seat-based pricing was designed for a world where software was siloed by function. Sales used one tool, finance used another, marketing had a third. That world is ending.

As AI finance tools and agents begin to automate tasks that humans used to perform, the number of seats becomes a poor proxy for the value a product actually delivers.

The market is moving toward consumption-based and success-based models, but it hasn't resolved the tension that creates for buyers who want cost predictability. Isaac Strulowitz's view is that SaaS-based revenue should still carry a premium because that stable subscription foundation is "the distribution and trust infrastructure that kind of makes the agentic modernization possible in the first place." The base isn't worthless, but it has to be genuinely load-bearing (not just familiar).

Go into Your Next Investor Conversation Prepared

The market isn't closed. But it is discerning in ways it wasn't a year ago. The CFOs who navigate this environment well won't necessarily have the most exciting AI story. A compelling AI story is important, but it’s not the only factor that generates conviction among investors.

• "What I always tell the finance team is you're always trying to focus on three things: what happened, why, and where are we going. A lot of finance teams are architected in such a way where the 'what happened' is the core, and it's a little bit harder to understand the why and where we're going." — Isaac Strulowitz, Partner & CFO, Treville Capital Group

Four things worth getting right before you're in front of investors:

• Know your revenue durability story cold. Growth rate opens the door. What closes the deal is whether you can speak to retention, expansion, and why your core model isn't going away with data to back it up.

• Fix your data before you buy more AI. The best firms right now are “spending their time and budget on data engineering, and not necessarily the models themselves," according to Isaac Strulowitz. It’s garbage in, garbage out, so focus on cleaning up infrastructure and repairing broken processes before layering new AI use cases on top.

• Shift your finance function from reporting to forecasting. Most finance teams are built to answer what happened. Boards and investors in 2026 want to know why it happened and where things are going. Building the infrastructure to answer those questions is what separates a strategic finance function from a tactical one.

• Own your company's AI charter personally. If the strategy gets distributed across too many owners without coordination, you end up with what Alok Goel calls a heterogeneity problem — disconnected tools and agents that don't talk to each other, with no one who knows what the company actually has. Get expert help on what's possible, but stay at the center of driving it forward.

The conviction investors are looking for in 2026 doesn't come from having the right buzzwords. It comes from being the finance leader who has clearly thought through the hard questions before anyone asks them.

If you want to learn alongside peers navigating these same challenges in real time: