03-05-2026ASK THE EXPERTS

How to get funded in 2026 if you’re not an AI startup in San Francisco

If you’re building outside the AI hype storm, here’s what you need to know.

[Illustration: Îkhlas Art Zøne/Adobe Stock]

Raising venture capital for a physical-world company can feel harder than getting struck by lightning. You could be standing on a mountain for months, holding a metal pole in a storm, waiting. And you probably still wouldn’t get hit.

Meanwhile, it can seem like founders in San Francisco announce a new AI round every other week. Capital moves quickly when you’re building software that rides the current hype cycle. If you’re building something that touches atoms instead of code, like manufacturing, energy, agriculture, or materials, you’re often grinding quietly. The timelines are longer. The checks are fewer. The rejections stack up. And pardon my French, but you get your ass kicked more than you’d like to admit.

That’s not a personal failure, however. It’s structural. And survival in this environment has far less to do with trend alignment than it does with grit and discipline.

I’m a mechanical engineer by training who moved into finance and now lead capital strategy for a venture-backed advanced technology company. I’ve spent the last several years inside capital-intensive businesses where success depends on factories, supply chains, and physics. I’ve learned this the hard way: companies like ours are rarely funded in one clean round. We survive by stacking imperfect capital sources and managing them with precision.

If you’re building outside the AI epicenter, here’s what that looks like in practice.

Angel investors as the first real bridge

Institutional venture firms tend to wait for signals. Angels often fund before those signals exist.

In hardware and deep tech, angels are frequently the first true believers. They underwrite uncertainty when institutions won’t. More importantly, they fund the “messy middle,” or the period after the initial excitement but before institutional readiness.

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