Jake Ellowitz and Alex Chee
Founders building great companies today face a stark reality compared to a decade ago.
As funding is increasingly concentrated into a narrow set of AI companies, traditional equity has never been harder to access for everyone else. Large, later-stage financings have become rarer and more dilutive, leaving many healthy and growth-oriented companies in a bind — stuck between high dilution and slim financing alternatives.
At Tribe Capital, we’ve witnessed this dynamic firsthand. To address these challenges, alongside and synergizing with our $2.2B to-date Venture Equity strategy, we’re launching ForceMultiple: Go-to-Market (GTM) funding that aims to scale to match ambitious growth targets without dilution or punitive debt dynamics.
Venture Capital is evolving, leaving founders behind.
After helping thousands of founders understand their Unit Economics through our underwriting system, Termina, one pattern is consistent: when unit economics work, the bottleneck is working capital to bridge payback. Despite the core purpose of Venture Capital being to finance novel, original ideas, it tends to be trend-following. This means that even if your company has product-market fit and is growing rapidly, but is not in a popular segment, your financing options are limited.
Since the 2023 VC Funding Shortage, available capital for Non-AI Mid- and Late-Stage startups in the US has fallen from $200B to $75B. Meanwhile, capital for Mid- and Late-Stage AI is more abundant than ever. The number of Non-AI Mid- and Late-Stage startups “In the Game,” or having fundraised in a 4-year period, has accordingly dropped by over 25%, a figure we expect only to increase.
We’re doing this because we believe Venture Capital alone has failed its founders, leaving an excess of $50B per year funding gap, much of which would have been equity capital to spend on new user acquisition.
This fundraising crunch is a significant challenge for growing companies seeking to scale further.
For most companies with product-market fit, the largest ongoing use of capital isn’t R&D or capex. It’s GTM, and it comes with challenging trade-offs.
GTM spend creates a cash “trough”: you spend today to recover and realize returns months later. In an era where equity is scarce and highly dilutive, this trough eats runway, squeezes optionality, and forces founders to make tough choices between growth, forward development, and ownership.
Alternative forms of capital — traditional debt, revolving credit lines, or ARR financing — address part of the equation, but they’re built on fixed repayment schedules that rarely align with the payback timing of acquired cohorts. Moreover, they impose a heavy debt burden that many companies consider a “Sword of Damocles,” a persistent, looming danger.
A company with Product-Market Fit is leaving money on the table when GTM is constrained.
ForceMultiple aims to tackle this structural challenge by investing in a company’s GTM effort on an ongoing basis and aligning ourselves with outcomes. We invest when you invest. We get paid when you get paid. And if outcomes fall short, we share that downside with you.
Rather than loading founders up with restrictive debt or forcing costly equity rounds, our solution provides flexible, scalable, and growth-aligned capital:
- Non-dilutive and flexible: Founders retain ownership and strategic flexibility, deploying capital to expand customer acquisition without immediate dilution.
- Aligned to performance, not arbitrary payback schedules: Capital scales with your growth; repayments are tied to realized customer collections and revenue, rather than fixed obligations that can burden the business if growth patterns fluctuate.
- Downside risk alignment: If growth slows, downside risk stays with the capital provider — you don’t shoulder covenants or cash outflows that exacerbate a slowdown.
This is a capital solution designed to match how modern companies actually spend to grow. It’s scalable, performance-aligned growth capital that sits alongside — and enhances — a company’s existing financing stack.
ForceMultiple is live.
Too many founders with strong product-market fit have artificially limited growth prospects under the current fundraising shift. We’re actively partnering with founders to meet and exceed growth targets in flexible ways to scale up as you scale up. If that’s what you want for your next phase of growth, we’d love to talk.
Reach out → forcemultiple@tribecap.co
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