Akeel JabberInvestment Director, Horizen Capital · Investor, Entrepreneur and Petroleum Engineer

Is your startup truly investment-ready?

8 Apr 2026 · 1 min

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1:06

In this video, speaker A outlines the core fundamentals that investors—whether venture capitalists, private equity firms, or institutional market participants—look for when evaluating a startup. The key criteria are profitability, positive cash flow, and demonstrable growth (ideally around 30% year‑over‑year). Size of revenue is not a strict barrier; even companies generating as little as $10 million in revenue can be attractive if they are profitable and growing. Investors also prioritize a recurring revenue model that shows traction and a strong product‑market fit in a growth area. The speaker warns that a compelling narrative alone is insufficient; reliance on “story stocks,” as seen in the 2021 market environment, often leads to poor outcomes when the underlying fundamentals are weak.

Chapters

Yeah, I would say it's across the board, whether you're a VC, PE, or you're, you know, an open company, you know, I mean, an investor in the institutional markets, you want to see profitability, you want to see cash flow that's positive, and you want to see growth. Those are, you know, the very, very kind of fundamentals. And it doesn't mean that you need $1 billion in revenue. You know, we've got companies that are doing $10 million in revenue, but they're profitable. And they can demonstrate growth. And even if as much as 30% year over year, you've got the ability to demonstrate growth and you want to obviously recurring model where there's traction. You know, I like to start with product market fit. Can the company demonstrate that they have a strong product market fit in a growth area and that they're growing at the same time? And so investors are just looking for these fundamentals. It's not enough just to have a story. Okay. And there are times when the markets have been open, as recent as 2021, where story stocks were getting invested in. Those investors didn't always fare so well because the stories didn't turn out to be fundamentally sound.