Pitching and fundraising at the late stage is won months before a term sheet is offered. The companies that close competitive rounds, they have their metrics in place, practiced their story and built the trust with the investor well before. A live session at Disrupt 2025 will focus on doing this well, with input from Andrea Thomaz (Diligent Robotics), Zeya Yang (IVP) and Lila Preston (Generation Investment Management) discussing specifically what you need to be driving if the view you’ve got is one that takes in both growth and crossover investing.
If you plan on raising in the next 6–12 months, act like a public-company CFO and category storyteller today. Here’s how to get ready so that diligence becomes a confirmation, not an exploratory mission.
Prove the metrics investors actually underwrite
Late-stage investors are purchasing efficiency and durability. Keep track of and monitor the metrics that forecast both. For recurring revenue orientated businesses, code to showcase net dollar retention by segment (top quartile cloud companies maintaining 120%+ NDR – per the Bessemer Cloud Index), gross margin expansion, payback periods by channel and a burn multiple that shows the capital efficiency through each growth phase. Carta and PitchBook have observed that down rounds tend to concentrate where NDR is weak and burn multiples are high — don’t let your data room be a clue pointing towards either.
For AI-native offerings, measure cost-to-serve and the rate of improvement. Display inference cost per active user or seat, GPU hours for a $ of ARR, service latency/reliability SLAs meeting enterprise thresholds. IVP and other growth investors are benchmarking AI workloads more commonly on unit economics not raw user counts — anchor the roadmap to model serving cost reductions or increased fine-tuning efficiency downhill.
For robotics and similar hardware-centric companies, focus on margin trajectory and cash conversion. Investors seek supply chain resilience, inventory turns and field reliability (e.g., warranty incidence and mean time between failures) to increase as deployments scale. Post-install servicing revenue and software attach can significantly lift blended margins — make that mix shift clear.
Impact-oriented growth funds look closely at measurable results. If the climate or health impact is central, map your reporting to something like the GHG Protocol, or clinical end points, and pull out an attributable contribution from market‑wide trends. Generation Investment Management, for instance, is searching for growth engines that produce financial and objectively trackable mission effects.
Create data room that helps reduce diligence
Create a clean investor grade data room before you do outreach. Audited or reviewed financials, monthly P&L and cash flow, cohort retention analyses, pipeline and win-rate reports, very clear revenue recognition policy (ASC 606 compliant issues there). Throw in things like SOC 2 or similar security accreditations, pen-test reports, DPAs, IP assignments and open-source compliance — including a summary of any compliance failures you’re aware of to date! — plus your key customer contracts with standardized terms.
Lock down cap table hygiene: option pool refresh modeled, 409A up to date, founder vesting and acceleration terms unambiguous, and SAFEs/notes mapped to pro forma ownership. A neat, legal folder (charter, board consents, equity plan) will trim weeks from a process and cut out the risk premium built into an offered term sheet.
Tell a story that can be defended, over time, by a partner
Your round must be sold by growth partners in Monday partner meetings. Give them a thesis they can underwrite: a clean problem statement, an effective wedge, and a clear path from product-market fit to category dominance. Quantify the next 24 months with milestone-linked use of proceeds — new logos for named ICP, geographic expansion, margin inflection from doing XYZ in your supply chain, or AI infra savings — so money is very clearly converting to risk reduction.
Defensibility is the fulcrum. Define your moat: data rights that are proprietary, switching costs with multiyear contracts, distribution advantages or ecosystem leverage points. If your foundation is models, the place to document model portability and the cost of hedging. If hardware is essential, detail patents and vendor exclusivity and in-house manufacturing capabilities that can protect margin.
Create an intentional investor pipeline
6-9 months in advance, start mapping 30-40 targets with investment amount ranked by check size, stage, domain expertise and portfolio adjacencies. Post light-weight quarterly updates to build familiarity long before a formal raise. Ventures like IVP generally lead Series B-E with big checks, and place a premium on category depth and ARR quality; growth investors like Generation IM value unit economics sustainability and governance. Match the mandate to the message.
Run a paced process. First time meetings within a pre-briefing two- to three-week timeframe, references that are able to speak about your execution and the shape of your syndicate (lead + participation from strategics / customers). Momentum counts, and so does clarity on what you will and won’t put up with in terms.
Expect terms, timing, and alternatives
Growth rounds now exceed the boom of 2021 in duration. Reporting by PitchBook-NVCA indicates longer diligence and more structure in term sheets. Figure out ahead of time where you stand on liquidation preferences, participation, milestone tranches and secondary. Model a base, upside and downside case such that you can reach towards an extension or right sized round —or structured alternative — without flinching.
Keep optionality alive. Venture debt and revenue-based financing can also help extend runway if you have sound unit economics; retention and gross margin will be subject to intense lender due diligence scrutiny. Secondary liquidity, when used in moderation, can clean cap tables and align teams without over-raising. The best results are achieved when you can confidently say “no.”
What live at Disrupt 2025 will bring
Andrea Thomaz will bring a hard-fought lens on scaling AI-driven hardware in regulated environments and earning trust with hospital systems and enterprise buyers. Zeya Yang will examine how AI-native companies should prove durable ARR and cost curves investors can trust. Lila Preston will provide a global growth equity lens on governance, impact measurement and building for resilience — not just speed.
Arrive prepared to translate their playbooks into your own: polish the numbers that count, assemble a story that partners can tell and grow connections that build into a lead. The late-stage raise is not a finish line — it’s the outcome of preparation you begin today.