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Most companies reach a point where waiting on financials becomes routine. “We’ll have numbers soon” stops being a temporary explanation and starts being an operating assumption. Teams plan around it, leadership works around it, and everyone quietly adjusts to running decisions on information that is days or weeks old.

There is a version of this story where a promising software company, backed by almost $100M dollars from one of Silicon Valley’s most prominent venture capital firms, builds something real and exits cleanly. The engineers were talented. The technology was genuinely innovative. The founding team had vision. That is not what happened.

There’s a version of this story where Rooled found Taxwire. But that’s not what happened.

There’s a conversation that comes up again and again in the work we do with founders — usually somewhere around the CFO advisory stage, when a company has real revenue, real traction, and a table full of investors who want more of their equity. The question on the table is almost always framed the same way: when do we raise the next round?

There’s a persistent instinct in fundraising to treat financial projections as a persuasion tool. If the numbers are big enough, the thinking goes, they signal the size of the opportunity and the ambition of the team pursuing it. So models get built toward a conclusion — the revenue curve steepens, the margin expansion accelerates, the growth rates hold at levels that require everything to go right for several years in a row. The deck looks compelling. The forecast does not hold up in the room.

AI has become a fixture in every finance conversation — from board decks to vendor pitches to hiring briefs. And with that ubiquity comes a predictable problem: expectations that have drifted well ahead of operational reality. For many finance teams at venture-backed startups, the assumption is that AI will fundamentally transform how the function operates.