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Three huge fundraising mistakes founders are making in 2026
WRITEN BY
James Church
Author, Investable Entrepreneur
James is an award-winning business advisor and best-selling author. His clients have raised over £200m in early-stage funding.
Yet again this week, another founder with years of commercial experience tells me they’ve been fundraising for months with nothing to show for it. They’ve spent weeks on their business case, they’re on v.12 of their deck, and when they reach out to investors, they get tumble weeds.
In the same week, a client of mine closed £600k for their pre-seed round.
At some point, you need to stop blaming the market for the fact that you’re not raising, and start looking at how you’re approaching the process itself.
Because most fundraising failures are not caused by bad timing or difficult investors. They’re caused by founders following a playbook that doesn’t work.
I speak with tens of founders each week, and I see the same pattern again and again. Founders send AI-generated pitch decks that sound interchangeable with every other startup raising capital. They spend weeks refining feature slides while offering very little evidence that anyone genuinely cares about the product. They chase any investor with a cheque rather than identifying investors aligned with the business they are actually building.
Then, if they do get a meeting, they fill investor conversations with far too much information because they assume detail creates confidence. I see founders walking through endless slides, unpacking every feature, explaining every market angle, and answering questions that nobody has even asked yet.
Usually, this behaviour comes from a good place – you care deeply about your business and you want investors to fully understand it. But when you struggle to communicate the core opportunity clearly and directly, investors often see that as uncertainty rather than depth.
The long, painful and failed attempts at fundraising are rarely due to a founder having a lack of information. They’re nearly always down to three common mistakes.
Mistake 1: Most founders are pitching the average
There’s a dangerous assumption in startup culture that fundraising is mainly about brilliant ideas and the power of persuasion. You’re taught that if you can just improve your pitch enough, investors will eventually say yes.
But investors are not backing ideas in isolation. They’re assessing risk, judgment, credibility, execution ability, and momentum. They’re trying to determine whether you can build something commercially durable under pressure.
Investors see hundreds of businesses positioning themselves as category-defining opportunities. And most of those founders sound the same because the AI you’ve used to develop your pitch language is giving every founder a version of the same text:
“The market is moving, but existing solutions have not kept pace.”
“Customers are already changing behaviour.”
“Our moat is not just the technology – it’s the combination of distribution, customer behaviour, and operational integration that compound over time.”
“This is no longer a future problem – it is an operational problem today.”
This makes you sound like the average. AI is trained on all available data and used by nearly every founder. Therefore, it makes sense that everything it produces brings all founders towards the middle. Founders terrible at pitching get elevated to the median, and those who have great potential get pushed down towards the baseline.
Investors have become very good at filtering out this AI-generated noise. What cuts through is communication that inspires, has personality, shows the investors the founders’ priorities, and captures the personality of the individuals behind this brilliant business.
Mistake 2: Pitching before credibility
While many founders are obsessing over perfecting the deck and getting AI to write their slides, the smarter approach is to focus on how you express your credibility, insights and authority.
This can take different forms.
It might be customer traction, strategic partnerships, a waiting list, revenue consistency, industry recognition, or unusually high engagement from a specific market segment. It can also be your own personal track record
What matters is that you are demonstrating you have something real, something tangible, something that you’ve built and are able to get others excited by. You want to show instantly how you are driving progress, building momentum and gaining traction.
Most founders think that investors will understand this progress and traction from the various claims that they would make in their pitch deck, but it’s actually not the case. Investors build confidence in a founder and their ability through observing their behaviour and their progress over time
I’ve seen founders completely change the outcome of a raise within weeks simply by reframing and expanding on their progress, experience, credibility, and traction. Suddenly, investor conversations become easier because they see a founder who’s capable of delivering a return.
Mistake 3: Thinking automation makes fundraising easier
There are two types of founders: those who scrape investor lists, send generic cold emails, attach decks immediately, then wonder why nobody responds.
Then there are the founders who spend weeks and months developing their business case, their pitch, and their projections, and then get scared to actually put themselves out into the market, probably for fear of rejection. Their safety net is behind their computer screen, and they really just want to keep building in their spare room rather than get their ideas out into the world.
Neither of these types of founders raise investment. The founders who raise investment are the ones who prioritise human relationships over and above everything else.
Fundraising remains deeply human despite all the automation surrounding startup ecosystems. Investors still back people they trust. Trust usually develops through stories and human connection – not cut and paste DMs and generic cold emails.
The founders who perform well during fundraising usually spend far more time building relationships with investors. They engage with thought and personality, and they even publish their insights publicly to demonstrate credibility. They tend to prioritise awareness of themselves before awareness of their ideas.
I’ve watched founders go from zero investor interest to multiple term sheets in a matter of weeks after changing how they approached their outreach communication. The business didn’t change at all, but the way they showed up personally did.
Stop following the crowd
The startup ecosystem has created a strange fundraising culture where you are encouraged to copy what other founders are doing without questioning whether it actually works.
Everyone uses similar decks with similar language and similar outreach tactics. Then everyone wonders why investor attention is so difficult to secure.
I’ve spent the last 10 years helping founders stand out, to be seen as different to those around them, to position them in the top 1% of founders successfully raising investment.
The one thing that’s taught me is that the founders who successfully raise are usually the ones willing to step outside the typical pattern. The ones who embrace doing things differently from the rest.
Most importantly, they recognise that investors are not looking for the loudest founder in the room, who thinks they have the best idea. They realise investors are looking for the founder who appears most likely to execute.
If you’ve been fundraising for months without traction, it’s worth asking whether the issue is really the market – or whether you’re still following a process designed for a different environment. Or falling into the traps that draw you towards the average.
If you want to do things differently, stand out from your peers and grab an investors attention, check out how I can help you raise investment.
