Navigating Founders’ Fundraising Journeys: Q&A with Adam Caplan on his New Role as Investment Manager

Adam Caplan has been at Halcyon for nearly three years, working on developing and executing the curriculums for our residential accelerator programs. Adam got his start at the Aga Khan Foundation , where he helped create their first impact investment fund. He then led research initiatives at several global incubators and accelerators, mentoring founding teams and mobilizing investments for mission-driven startups in the US, South Asia, and East Africa.

At Halcyon, Adam was involved in a major transition as our organization shifted from a sector-agnostic lens to fellowships along three key verticals—Health, Climate, and EquityTech—adapting our programming to source relevant advisors and workshop presenters, facilitate peer review sessions, and conduct weekly mentoring support with each founder in his cohorts. In addition, Adam organized and curated events to gather networks of partners, stakeholders, and investors to connect with founders in-residency.

In May 2025, Adam began a brand-new role at Halcyon: Investment Manager. Check out this Q&A to learn more about how Halcyon is expanding our support for our founders and alumni in their fundraising journeys:

• What is the biggest challenge you’ve seen founders struggle with when fundraising?

A lot of founders, especially first-time founders, approach fundraising with a bit of a one-size-fits-all strategy. We have this idea of what the venture capital ecosystem and the investment lifecycle for startups looks like—we generally think of it as bootstrapping, to friends and family, to a seed round, to a Series A—and so a lot of founders come in with the last slide of their pitch deck being an ask for $750K. And while that's not necessarily a bad thing, you can't take a one-size-fits-all approach to anything, and certainly not for individual company stories. A lot of the time, what people realize throughout the Halcyon program is that they need to update, amend, or rethink their fundraising strategy—the amount, the timeline, and perhaps the type of capital.

• How are you shaping your new role as Investment Manager at Halcyon?

I’m thinking about this role across three main areas:

1. Curriculum — In many ways, Halcyon is an educational institution for early-stage, impact-driven startups. So, what are we teaching founders about alternative financing opportunities when they're in the program? This means developing a workshop series on alternative financing options for all of our residential and intensive programs and developing a core curriculum on alternative financing that can then be adapted to different programs in different verticals and/or regions.
2. Network — This piece is essentially building and better targeting Halcyon’s investor network. We’ve been running an incubator and accelerator in DC and in other parts of the world for over 10 years, but the nature of the companies we work with has evolved over time—we're accelerating companies that are a little more mature, and we've now aligned along these three verticals and in a few key regions. Strengthening and segmenting our investor networks in those areas is a big part of this job.
3. Facilitation — The facilitation piece is bringing together the investment opportunities for our founders, alumni, and expanded investor network. We sit at an interesting nexus point between now almost 600 Halcyon founders, many of whom have investment needs and a growing network of their own investors. So, how do we use that middle-person role to create and facilitate real investment opportunities?

An important note is that my role is located within the Programs team at Halcyon and is distinct from our sister organization, Halcyon Venture Partners (HVP). There will be a lot of collaboration between myself and the HVP team, but in many cases, it will be helping founders who aren't going to be the right fit for HVP or other VC funds understand where to go next. This will be an exciting iterative process as we gain a better understanding of the investment needs of our founders and alumni and how myself and the HVP team—either through investment capital from their fund or their other support—can help them in their fundraising journeys.

• Where do you see the role of VC for early-stage, impact-driven founders?

When you look upstream at earlier stage companies, even in the best of times, VC follows a pretty standard portfolio model where most of the investments are not going to be successful, and so you need to invest only in companies that you can see having parabolic or exponential returns. Most ventures are not going to have this scalable trajectory or the huge market size that VC tends to chase. On top of that, a lot of the impact-driven companies that are coming through Halcyon are trying to increase access to goods and services for populations that haven't had them before. This means that oftentimes, there's some significant early behavior change and adoption challenges they face that may require grant capital or subsidy for customer discovery and to figure out the right distribution model for them. So, it might be that they're not the right fit for VC ever, or it might be that they're not the right fit for VC at the early stage they're coming into Halcyon. One of the things we want to do is help founders understand whether VC ought to be part of their fundraising strategy, and if so, at what point in their business development that might be appropriate.

• What are some alternative funding sources you’ve pointed founders to?

1. Philanthropic/Program-Related Investments — Some foundations make what are called ‘program-related investments,’ which are concessionary or lower-interest, founder-friendly term investments in pursuit of a foundation’s stated mission. There's a fair number of foundations in the U.S. and worldwide that are making these investments in Health, Climate, FinTech, EdTech, and other EquityTech sectors. This is an untapped area that founders of ours aren't necessarily accessing enough.
2. Crowdfunding — A lot of us think about IndieGoGo and Kickstarter being a place where we find consumer products that we're interested in, but there's a lot of crowdfunding platforms that are focused specifically on raising equity for startups that are trying to tap into unaccredited investors in a more democratized investment landscape by providing access for these investors to participate in equity rounds.
3. Grants — Halcyon is based here in DC, and federal government grants, especially SBIR grants from various government agencies, can be a big draw for our founders. The future of those is uncertain, but it's still a rich opportunity set, especially at the pre-seed stage. Generally, grants are an area that a lot of our founders are not as focused on, perhaps because they are concerned about it being a bad signal to VC investors. What they don't realize is that a lot of investors like a company’s business model to be de-risked by non-dilutive capital.
4. Revenue-Based Financing — Some of the companies that are coming into Halcyon are pre-revenue, but others already have traction, and a lot of our alumni companies that have had a few more years in the market do have viable and sustainable recurring revenue and could look at revenue-based options as a non-dilutive way to scale.

•  What’s one big fundraising win you’ve been part of at Halcyon?

Oncovana (2025 Health Fellowship) met an angel investor at our Investor Dinner, and they drafted a term sheet right there at the table. That Investor event was itself an experiment—we wanted to continue improving on Halcyon’s approach to building and tapping into our investor network to create more value for our founders. So, we reconceived what a program’s investor event should be, who should be invited, and what its end goal was, and there were a lot of valuable connections made.

Personally, I worked with the Oncovana team in the lead-up to the event on how to tailor their pitch and who was going to be in the room. Looking more broadly, Oncovana came into Halcyon wanting to raise around $500K, but by the end, they actually decided to raise just $40K to build out their MVP and get into a pilot study with their design partner, and then push off raising their seed round until the end of 2025 or early next year. That kind of journey is kind of exactly what I want to work with founders on. The journey—way before you raise money—is figuring out, do I need to be raising money? If so, when, how much, and from whom?