Raising a late series, live: what got you here won't get you there

London Business School's workshop at the Sifted Summit on 1 October marked the culmination of a year of relationship-building and ecosystem-growing with Sifted, the FT-backed digital media platform covering European startups, technology trends and venture capital.

The LBS-Sifted knowledge partnership has produced 12 op-eds by LBS faculty, a roundtable discussion led by Dr Ioannis Ioannou, and a report, Solving Europe's AI adoption puzzle, with contributions from Professors Nicos Savva and Lynda Gratton, Sergei Guriev, Dean of LBS, and Dr Ekaterina Abramova. The Summit session brought the year to a close and was an excellent exercise in building the relationship with Sifted. We look forward to the year ahead.

Led by Osman Haneef, Head of the LBS Incubator and Senior Manager of Ventures, the workshop, Raising a late series, live! What got you here won't get you there, was very well attended and received.

Stats, not odds

Osman opened with a quick audience poll on where European venture money is going, before showing the data. He then turned to the workshop's central argument: what carried a company through pre-seed and seed rounds is not enough for a late-stage raise.

Late-stage investors, he explained, price differently. They typically need about three times their money, rather than the five to ten times early-stage investors look for, and they are focused on execution risk rather than market risk. They want to see a credible route to break-even or profitability. Team still matters, but at this stage it is weighed alongside evidence that the business can deliver. And because they work back from a likely exit, the price they pay matters a great deal.

You are the investment committee

The heart of the session was an exercise in which founders, investors and ecosystem professionals read deal memos based on real companies, with names removed, and voted to invest or pass, before debating their reasoning (with sweets for those who spoke up).

The first case was a Series D AI platform that turns plain-English instructions into software. Some voted to invest, swayed by market momentum. Those who passed cited the lack of profitability and the risks in the business model. The warning signs were in the memo all along: unaudited growth figures, a lawsuit from a former executive and press scrutiny of its AI claims. It was Builder.ai, which collapsed into insolvency in 2025 after its revenues were found to have been heavily overstated. The lesson, as Osman put it, is that seeing the numbers is not the same as checking them.

The second was a Series B raise by a payments company expanding from its home market in Egypt into several others. This one divided the room more evenly, with enthusiasm for a founder who had started from a problem he understood, against concern about the path to profitability and exit. It was drawn from an LBS case written by Dr Luisa Alemany, Academic Director of the Institute of Entrepreneurship and Private Capital. The investors' response is the instructive part: the founders were not well prepared for what the next stage demanded, so one of the company's existing investors stepped in, including seconding a member of its own team to help get documents and systems in order. Osman's takeaway was to do the documentation and legal preparation before you go to market, rather than relying on a blitz of outreach emails. A smoother process follows from having the groundwork done.

The final case was a European digital bank raising at a valuation well below its peak, a down round. Opinions split again. Osman suggested that both views were right: there were red flags and green flags alike, and for an incoming investor a down round can be an attractive entry point. Investors at that price went on to see the bank turn profitable and its value roughly triple. A down round is not necessarily the end of the story.

Are you ready?

Participants then turned the same lens on their own companies, scoring themselves with a neighbour or two and asking where the red flags might be. Those not yet at the scale-up stage considered what they would look for, while service providers thought about the companies they work with. The aim was to decide whether to raise now, fix first, or look for another route.

Osman closed with a reminder that venture capital is just one option for scale-ups. There is, he said, something of a funding buffet, as LBS faculty call it, and it is up to founders to work out which opportunities best fit their business.

Our thanks also go to Dr Casidhe Troyer, Assistant Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship, who joined the workshop and represented LBS at the Sifted Summit.