One way to get a big burst of attention for any company: A splashy funding announcement with a big valuation.
What we think we’ll see more of in 2027: Companies announcing that they’re not raising capital. Not because they can’t, but because they don’t need to.
Chris, one of the authors of this piece, is an early case study in a pre-AI era. He was a practicing physician when he started his company, Access Physicians, in 2011. He and his three cofounders had an idea to bring telemedicine to hospitals that had historically been slow to adopt new technology. Given their experience with health systems, they knew that it would take time to pressure test the model, so they didn’t want to raise capital too soon.
It ended up taking eight years to bring the solution to market and scale the technology nationwide. During that time, Chris, a newly minted cardiologist, worked as an every-other-weekend hospitalist to pay the bills. The starting salary he was giving up as a trained cardiologist: $550,000. Most of his peers in medicine thought he had lost his mind.
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But it gave the team the freedom to build a business on their own terms. The founders agreed not to take distributions, even as the business grew, and reinvest as much of the revenue as they could. Cash flow hiccups and working capital needs were managed through lines of credit. It was a massive founder sacrifice, but all for a very specific reason.