The institutional capital stack has two centers of gravity: seed-stage venture, where most check sizes sit below $5 million, and late-stage crossover, where the smallest check is usually $100 million. Between the two — the $10 million to $100 million growth round — is where we see the best risk-adjusted returns of the cycle. The thesis is unfashionable, which is part of why it works.

Three structural reasons. First, competition is thinner. The mega-funds that redefined late-stage pricing for the last decade have retrenched into larger and fewer positions; their LPs no longer reward the long deployment horizons that aggressive Series C-and-beyond investing requires. Second, the companies raising in this band are past product-market fit; the binary risk is gone, but the company is still small enough that a single new market, a single key hire, or a single distribution partnership can move enterprise value materially. Third, exit multiples remain intact — $10–$100M-round companies are attractive to strategics, private-equity rollup platforms, secondary buyers, and IPO investors alike, which keeps the path to liquidity unusually optionally rich.

For founders, the practical implication is to resist the temptation to raise at the extremes of the stack. A disciplined $30–60M round from a concentrated cap table of institutional family offices and sector-specialist funds is almost always a stronger setup for the next chapter than a $200M blitz. The blitz creates a valuation that future rounds have to outrun, dilutes the founder team beyond what later financings can absorb, and signals dependence on a single category of capital. The disciplined round, by contrast, sets a clean preference stack, leaves room for an opportunistic top-up, and pre-builds the relationships that the next round will run through.

For allocators, the discipline is to underwrite for capital efficiency, not for narrative. The companies that compound from $50M to $500M in enterprise value are rarely the ones that raised the most. They are the ones that raised the right amount, from the right counterparts, on the right terms.

At Brillwood, the bulk of our Capital practice sits precisely in this band — where our 5,000+ investor rolodex and family-office weighting are most effective.