Deal Flow Pulse: August 2026

August was an active month across both of Plantec's routes to working with founders, direct investment and mandate supported fundraising, often running in parallel.

Direct investment

On the direct investment side, we reviewed opportunities across deep tech, AI infrastructure, and sports technology. The stage was predominantly pre-seed and seed. We saw genuine technical innovation in a few cases, and genuine commercial traction in fewer. The gap between the two remains wider than most founders acknowledge. We passed on several conversations where the product was interesting but the path to a paying customer was underspecified.

Mandate and advisory

On the mandate and advisory side, we have been running structured fundraising processes for companies at Series A and beyond. The work this month included:

• Companies seeking priced equity rounds

• Strategic secondary transactions

• Operator-type acquisition partners

Each mandate is different in its investor targeting and its narrative, but the common thread is process discipline. Founders who come to us mid-raise having sent their deck broadly and burned warm contacts are harder to help than founders who engage us before they start.

Investor introductions

We also made a number of investor introductions this month, across:

• Fintech

• Telco data intelligence

• Sports media technology

Some of these are to growth-stage PE, some to sector-specific VCs, and some to family offices with strategic appetite.

What we are watching

A pattern we are seeing repeatedly is that the secondary market for quality companies at a discount to last round is creating real opportunities for patient buyers. We are watching this space carefully.

If you are building in our sectors and thinking about your next raise, or if you are an investor looking for structured deal flow in fintech, telecoms, sports tech, or deep tech, we are open to introductions.