Although it's been a record-breaking twelve months in venture capital, early-stage funding has fallen each year since 2022. All of the growth has been in $250m+ rounds, with Anthropic and OpenAI alone making up around a third of 2026 funding so far. We're finding that many smaller tech businesses are materially cash-strapped and struggling to secure new investment.
But even with investment, the hard choices don't go away. The businesses that raised the most still have to decide what to build, what to stop and where to put their people. Capital buys runway. It doesn't buy focus.
The individual delivers more
The pressures that followed the global financial crisis of 2007-8 pushed businesses toward cloud adoption and ultimately led to the SaaS explosion of the 2010s. In the same way, AI is changing the way we work today. It feels likely that the coming decade will be an extremely buoyant period for tech-enabled businesses.
One of the defining factors of this period will be that the individual delivers more. By reducing time spent on content production, data analysis, prototype development and repetitive tasks, team members become more productive. Big Tech is already restructuring around this. For younger businesses, it means faster progress without needing a larger team. That doesn't necessarily mean lower overall costs, though: savings on people may be entirely offset by token spend.
However, by giving non-technical team members powerful new tools, we bypass the discipline of R&D, placing data security, systems resilience, product stability and proper prioritisation at risk. We're seeing businesses move away from unlimited employee experimentation toward measurable business and financial impact.
At Atani Operating Partners, we advocate treating AI like any other technology. Time, tokens and energy are resources with a cost, and they need to be spent well. Without a considered approach to these investments, the business is flapping in the wind.
The Vespa methodology
Our approach is described by the Vespa methodology, which requires a formal definition of the Vision, a supporting Strategy, a time-limited Plan and organisational Alignment. This way of working, developed over twenty years in high-growth tech including three exits, ensures the efficient and effective deployment of resources, measurable impact and iterative improvement over time.
The name comes from the wasp, and from the Vespa scooter named after it, both famous for a pinched waist. Vision and Strategy can be broad. But when you get to Planning and Alignment, everything has to squeeze through the narrow point of the resource you actually have. That pinch is where the hard choices get made.
Some questions don't sit neatly in one stage. The market a business plays in, for example, shapes both its vision and its strategy. So treat the four stages as overlapping rather than sealed boxes.
Vision. Why are you doing this? Why are you a builder rather than an employee? What does a win look like, and what are you building? This context is held as confidential and acknowledged as subject to change. It produces a formal vision statement.
Strategy. Where are you playing, and what sets you apart? What are the major barriers to achieving your vision, and how will you overcome them? Who owns which decisions? The output is a strategy deck: strategic principles, big bets, investments and timelines, and the assumptions to review along the way.
Planning. Who are your adjacent businesses and competitors? Does the outside world see you the way you see yourself? How much progress have you made, how much runway do you have, and what really drives growth? This produces an ecosystem map, benchmarking and a time-limited plan.
Alignment. Does the team understand the plan? Is the organisation structured to deliver it? Do people have clear goals, and are they empowered to challenge decisions? How often do leaders review performance together? The outputs are briefings for the whole team, an org review, a KPI and incentive framework, and an operating rhythm with monthly and quarterly reviews.
What comes next
The principles behind Vespa haven't changed in twenty years. What has changed is how resources get deployed, and how fast. So the question for 2027 is this: how do businesses make sure their resources are deployed effectively in the new AI world, and how will that change over the coming years? That's what we'll look at next.
If you're facing those choices now, that's the work we do at Atani. Happy to talk it through at ataniops.com.
