The Fed Held Again. If You're Raising This Fall, Stop Waiting for the Cut.
- Michael Olson
- 16 minutes ago
- 4 min read
On July 29, the Federal Open Market Committee left the federal funds rate unchanged at 3.50% to 3.75%. Chair Kevin Warsh's press conference that afternoon emphasized the Fed's commitment to delivering price stability. The next meeting is September 15–16, and it comes with a fresh Summary of Economic Projections.
The detail worth sitting with: according to Forbes' Fed tracker, nine of the eighteen Fed officials have penciled in at least one rate hike for 2026. Not a cut. A hike. The committee is split down the middle on direction, not just timing.
For anyone raising capital this fall, that is the whole story. The rate relief a lot of companies have been implicitly waiting on since 2024 is not a scheduled event. It is a coin flip.
What "no relief" actually changes about your raise
The reflex is to read a rate hold as bad news for fundraising. That is too simple. What it really does is shift where value has to come from in a deal.
When debt is cheap, a buyer or a sponsor can pay a stronger price and still hit their return, because leverage does the work. When debt stays expensive and the direction is uncertain, that math closes. The sponsor has to get the return from the operating business — growth, margin, execution — rather than from the capital structure.
That has three consequences that show up directly in how you get funded.
Diligence goes deeper into the operations. If leverage isn't producing the return, the plan has to. Expect harder questions about unit economics, retention, pricing power, and the credibility of the growth curve. A model built to look good is a liability here; a model built to be stressed is an asset.
Equity gets relatively more attractive to the investor. Cherry Bekaert's mid-year data shows growth and expansion investments were the only segment growing in Q2 — up 19.1% year over year to an estimated 493 deals — while new platform buyouts fell 34% and add-on value dropped 44.5%. Capital that can't be deployed into levered buyouts at acceptable prices does not disappear. It moves toward minority and growth positions. That is directly relevant to growth-stage companies.
The exit backlog creates pressure that works in your favor. Cherry Bekaert reports Q2 exit value of $102.6 billion, down 46.3% sequentially, and PE-backed portfolio company inventory of 13,509 businesses as of Q2, with median holds for still-owned companies stretched to roughly 4.2 years. Sponsors sitting on aging portfolios and constrained exits still have to put committed capital to work and still have to show LPs activity. Fewer easy paths, same obligation to deploy.
Taken together: the capital is looking for a different kind of deal than it was in 2021, and that different kind of deal is often exactly what an early- or growth-stage company is.
The other side of the table is getting smaller and more direct
There's a parallel shift worth understanding, because it changes who you should actually be talking to.
Goldman Sachs' family office survey — 245 global respondents, published October 2025 — found 39% of family offices planned to increase private equity allocations over the following twelve months, with alternatives at 42% of the average portfolio. Institutional Investor has reported the same broad direction: family capital moving further into private markets.
The operational detail in that Goldman survey is the one that matters most to a founder. Family office investment teams typically number fewer than five people. Goldman frames that as an advantage — small teams make agile decisions, without an investment committee bureaucracy.
It is also a constraint. A five-person team with a meaningful allocation to deploy cannot originate its own deal flow at scale. It cannot cover the market. It relies on relationships and intermediaries to bring it qualified opportunities that fit its mandate.
Which means: for a large and growing pool of exactly the kind of patient, direct, minority-friendly capital that suits a growth-stage company, being findable through the right channel is the entire game. You cannot cold-email your way into that pool reliably, because the people you'd be emailing are not sitting in an inbox waiting to discover you. They are waiting for someone they trust to bring them something that fits.
What to do between now and September 16
Do not build your raise around a rate decision you cannot forecast — especially one where half the committee is leaning the other way. Build it around the two things you control: whether your materials survive real diligence, and whether they reach investors whose current mandate actually matches you.
That is what Deal Insider Capital does.
We are retained by a network of smaller private equity groups, family offices, and angel investors who tell us what they are looking for — stage, sector, check size, structure. We target companies against that stated demand. When we bring a company to those investors, we are not making an introduction into the void. We are answering a question they already asked us.
For the company, we build the full package and run it: the investor memorandum, the financial model, the targeted investor list built from live mandates rather than stale public data, and the managed outreach campaign carried through to strong interest. The founder stays focused on the operating results that this market is going to diligence hard.
Rates will do what rates do. Your raise doesn't have to wait on them.
Book a 30-minute call: calendly.com/maz-dealinsider/30min, or reach us at dealinsider.net.
Deal Insider Capital is an M&A advisory and capital placement firm. Nothing above is investment advice or an offer to sell securities.
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