21/09/2026
This week I am posting a story about how we nearly crumbled last year after raising over $100k in secured funding. But this isn't about the funds raised—it's about the startup funding gaps nobody talks about.
The Startup Funding Gap Nobody Talks About
Last year, we nearly crumbled waiting for funding that had already been secured.
It sounds strange, but this is one of the realities of building a startup that I don't think we talk about enough.
Raising the funds is one thing.
Getting the funds into the operations in time to keep the business running is another.
Last year, we nearly crumbled waiting for funding that had already been secured. We had plans around it, commitments around it, and a team that was already working towards what the funding was supposed to help us execute.
But the funding disbursement got delayed.
And when you are building an early-stage startup, a delay is not just a delay.
Every additional day means something.
Someone on the team is waiting.
A vendor is waiting.
A project could be paused.
A product decision is waiting.
Your runway is getting shorter.
And gradually, the resources around the team start to deplete.
This year has made me think about this even more because my team and I have experienced a similar pattern again this year.
Well, it is something that is common with startups. You can hardly build a startup without hearing stories of companies that were just days away from shutting down before funding eventually came in.
One of the stories that comes to mind for me is SpaceX. In 2008, after three failed Falcon 1 launches, Elon Musk said the fourth launch was the last one they had money for and that another failure would have been game over. The fourth launch succeeded, and a few months later NASA awarded SpaceX a $1.6 billion contract for cargo missions to the International Space Station. (Elon Musk Archive)
You begin to realise that sometimes, the biggest problem is not necessarily that you don't have a product, a market or even committed capital.
It is the gap between when the capital is committed and when it actually becomes available to the business for operations.
And that gap can be extremely expensive for a startup.
In my experience, fundraising has probably been one of the most difficult parts of the founder journey.
But there is another part that can be just as difficult: running the company while waiting for the money to arrive.
Because startups don't pause while you wait for funding.
Your team still has to work.
Customers still expect you to deliver.
Technology still costs money.
Operations still continue.
And the founder is still expected to keep everyone motivated and moving.
This is where I think we need to start thinking differently about how we finance startups.
Maybe the solution isn't always another equity round.
Maybe we need more financial instruments designed specifically around the periods between funding rounds, delayed disbursements, receivables, contracts, and other predictable cash flows.
There is already movement in this direction, with more attention being paid to working capital and alternative financing for African startups and growing businesses.
For example, Uncap, an Africa-focused investment company, has used revenue-based financing, where businesses repay through a share of their revenues rather than giving up equity. The World Bank documented its experience deploying this model across businesses in Nigeria, Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda. (World Bank Blogs)
There are also newer models emerging in Nigeria. PACT, for example, is offering short-cycle working capital to revenue-generating Nigerian startups, structured around revenue and receivables rather than a traditional equity round. (OnAfrica)
But I think there is still a lot more room to build around the actual problems founders face.
Think about the list of challenges a startup faces:
Delayed funding.
Delayed customer payments.
Long enterprise sales cycles.
Payroll pressure.
Infrastructure costs.
FX volatility.
Regulatory delays.
Working capital gaps.
Customer acquisition costs.
The time between building something and the market actually validating it.
Each of these is a problem.
And every problem that repeatedly affects startups is potentially an opportunity to build something around.
That is probably the part that interests me the most.
Rather than always asking, "How do we get more funding into startups?"
Perhaps we should also be asking:
"How do we make startups more resilient while waiting for funding, waiting for customers to pay, or waiting for the market to validate what they are building?"
Because sometimes, a company doesn't fail because the idea was wrong.
It doesn't fail because the founder wasn't committed.
It doesn't even fail because there wasn't enough capital.
Sometimes, the company simply ran out of oxygen while waiting for the next oxygen supply.
And this is particularly important in markets like ours, where accessing capital and getting it into the business at the right time can still be difficult.
Interestingly, the funding numbers themselves tell an important story. Nigerian startups attracted $184.7 million in disclosed funding across 51 startups in the first half of 2026, while the ecosystem saw a major jump in August, when 20 startups reportedly raised a combined $364.1 million. But the H1 numbers also showed how concentrated funding remains, with the top 10 startups accounting for about 72% of the disclosed capital. (Nairametrics)
So perhaps we need to think beyond fundraising.
We need to think about how founders stay alive long enough to execute what they have raised the money to build.
How does a founder survive six months between raising and deploying capital?
How does a startup bridge a delayed disbursement without destroying its team?
How do you keep building something that may take years to mature while still having enough liquidity to survive today?
I don't have all the answers yet.
But after experiencing it firsthand, I know one thing:
A day of delay means something when you are building.
And sometimes, what looks like a small delay from the outside can be the difference between a startup continuing to build and a team slowly running out of energy, resources and hope.
Maybe there are businesses waiting to be built around solving exactly this problem.
Because funding a startup is important.
But keeping it alive long enough to use that funding well may be just as important.
Photo by ANTONI SHKRABA production: https://www.pexels.com/photo/a-man-and-a-woman-having-a-meeting-8837533/
This article was originally published on LinkedIn by Abdulkadir Suleiman Lapai.
