Successful fundraising in 2026
What this webinar covers
Michael Millar of SmplCo and Neil Wood of Wood Associates London — a UK corporate finance house with deep ties into HNW, VC, PE and family-office networks — ran a packed Barclays Eagle Labs session for 300+ founders on what's actually working in fundraising right now.
The blunt summary: investors are backing fewer companies, but writing bigger cheques for the ones that truly stand out. Knowing what makes one company stand out and another get filed under "interesting, not now" is the whole game in 2026.
Key takeaways
1. The UK angel market is "cautiously optimistic" — and concentrated
Neil walked through the shape of the market: roughly 15,000 angel investors in the UK, deploying around £1bn a year. Most of that goes into early-stage, pre-revenue ventures — driven heavily by SEIS / EIS tax relief.
What's hot in 2026: AI, health tech, fintech, and energy. What's not: anything that looks like a me-too SaaS play with no clear technical or distribution moat.
2. Profitability is back — even at seed
The dominant message from Neil's investor network: profitability and robust business plans now beat high-valuation growth stories. This is a real shift from 2021–22 thinking. Founders pitching "we'll be profitable eventually" are getting filed; founders showing a credible path to break-even are getting term sheets.
If your pitch deck doesn't have a clear answer to "when do you stop needing our money?", fix that before the next meeting.
3. Stop blanket-approaching investors
Mike's pet peeve, and Neil agreed strongly: founders sending the same generic deck to every investor on a list. It is the single most common mistake — and the most fixable.
Before you approach anyone, you should know:
- Why are they specifically going to be interested in you?
- What's their stage, sector and cheque-size focus?
- What's in their portfolio that signals fit?
- How will you reach them — warm intro, conference, fund mailer?
A small list of well-qualified investors converts ten times better than a big list of generic ones.
4. Prototypes change the conversation
Mike kept coming back to one point: a prototype changes the meeting. Investors can read a deck and stay neutral. They can see a working prototype and feel the product. That feeling is what gets you a second meeting.
This is the same logic behind SmplCo's 5-day prototype service — by the time you walk into the next round of investor meetings, you have something they can click, react to, and remember after the call.
5. Investor due diligence is more linear than founders expect
A lot of founders pitch as if "yes" means "here's the money". It doesn't. After the first meeting, expect a sequence: deeper meeting → due diligence → reference calls → term sheet → legals → close. Each step has a typical failure mode. Plan for them.
Going in with a positive mindset matters too: if an investor has agreed to deeper diligence, they want to find a way to back you. Treat them as on your side until proven otherwise.
6. The pitch fundamentals that still apply
Mike walked through the pitch parameters that matter most: clarity of problem, defensibility of solution, market size that's credible (not "it's a $50bn TAM"), traction that's real (paying customers > waitlist sign-ups), and a team narrative that explains why you are the right people for this.
Plus: don't try to do all of this from memory under pressure. Frameworks help. SmplCo's Pitch Prep Guide is the toolkit Mike walks founders through before live pitches.
Already wrote about this
There's a longer-form blog version of this session: Successful Fundraising in 2026: What Investors Actually Want.
Useful links
- Pitch Prep Guide — frameworks for storytelling, positioning, and thinking like an investor
- 5-Day Prototype service — the prototype-to-investor-meeting accelerator
- 25% off SmplCo for Eagle Labs members
Raising soon and want a second opinion?
If you're heading into a round and want help with deck, story, or prototype before you go, book a call.