StrikeSimple · fundraising

How much to raise, and why

Bottom-up burn × runway, stress-tested by the market regime, then checked against what each round can actually price at. Every number is editable; stages can be added, renamed, or switched off.

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Market regime

Cost inflation /yr

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Every factor in the formula

Why each term exists, and where it comes from

People costSalary × (1 + payroll load) ÷ 12, counted only from each hire's start month. A hire who starts in month 6 of an 18-month plan costs 13 months, not 18.

Operating costRecurring non-people spend: RPC/indexing infra, tools, legal & accounting retainers, community, conferences. Crypto teams underestimate travel and legal.

Cost inflation (CPI)Real price drift: (1 + CPI)^(m/12). Over 18–24 months it adds ~2–4%. This is the "inflation" that belongs on costs.

Market regimeYour bull/bear factor moves four dials, none of them a cost multiplier: how long the raise takes (+cushion, +contingency), what cap the market prices, and how much investors will write above your plan (+40% oversubscribed in a bull, "cut burn" in a bear). Bear raises your need and shrinks the ask; bull does the reverse.

RunwayBuild-to-milestone months + months the next raise takes (3 bull → 6 bear) + cushion. The round must fund the milestone and the raise after it.

Revenue & grantsSubtracted from burn, haircut by regime. Ecosystem grants (chain foundations) are probability-weighted; protocol fees ramp linearly to the milestone.

ContingencyApplied to net burn only (15–25%). Hires slip later but cost more; scope always grows. Not applied to one-offs, which already carry quotes.

One-off costsLumpy, dated items: audits + remediation passes, entity setup, liquidity seeding, bug bounty reserve, the Alliance NYC onboarding, round legal.

Top-down checkWhat the market lets you sell: post-money × max dilution. Post-money SAFEs stack additively (Alliance's $400k at $4M = 10% on its own). If need > capacity, cut scope or tranche — don't just accept 30% dilution.

How the venues we benchmark against were funded

Every venue on the revenue simulator's protocol reference — the options books, perp DEXs and the lending benchmark StrikeSimple is sized against — with each disclosed round: when, how much, at what price, who led, and what the market was doing at the time. Founders' backgrounds sit with each venue. Amounts are as announced, in USD; undisclosed means undisclosed, not zero.

Venue type

Structure

Market at the time

What it says for our raise

disclosed rounds only · Sep 2026

On-chain options raised small. No on-chain options venue has disclosed a round above $8.75M (Ribbon's Paradigm round, at a $250M FDV). First cheques were $1.85M (Ribbon) and $3.3M (Lyra), both token rounds; Dopex and Premia sold tokens publicly instead. All of them together come to ≈$30M.
Perps are where the venture money went. dYdX ($87M), Lighter ($89M) and Drift (≈$52M) raised ≈$228M between them, and Lighter's $68M at $1.5B in Nov 2025 is the largest on-chain round here.
The biggest perp venues skipped VC. Hyperliquid and GMX never took outside capital, and Jupiter took none until 2026; the token launch was the capital event (HYPE ≈$4B FDV on day one, JUP ≈$6B). That route needs founders who can fund the build themselves — Hyperliquid's came from a trading firm's profits.
The regime moves price and structure more than size. On-chain round medians sit between $7.5M and $10M in every regime. In a bear, what changes is who writes the cheque and at what price: Deribit's 2022 round came from existing holders at $400M, ≈80% below 2021; Lyra's was sold from its own DAO allocation; the 2026 money was strategic — ParaFi buying JUP at spot, Tether lending to Drift.

Every disclosed round, against the BTC cycle

Top: BTC price (log scale), shaded by market regime. Bottom: each round with a disclosed amount, sized on a log scale. Hover a dot for the round.

How "market at the time" is set

one rule, applied to every round

BullBTC's 14-day average is above a rising 200-day average, and no more than 40% below its all-time high.

BearBTC's 14-day average is below its 200-day average, and either that average is falling or price is more than 50% below its high.

NeutralAnything else: a correction inside an uptrend (mid-2021, spring 2025) or a recovery still far off the high (2019, most of 2023).

Runs shorter than three weeks fold into the band before them, so a label never hinges on a few days of chop. The label reads the price cycle, not venture appetite, which lags it: 2023 is neutral on price while crypto venture funding was at its low. Rounds dated only to a month are placed mid-month. Prices: Coin Metrics community data, topped up with Bitstamp closes; node scripts/regimes.js regenerates the bands.