After our Part I post on the vocabulary of startup funding, we sought to provide additional guidance to founders with new products. Their product exists in some stage of development. There’s early interest—maybe a pilot customer or two. The founder has started hearing phrases like “traction,” “runway,” and “institutional capital,” often in the same week. This is typically where Michigan founders begin to feel a little unmoored—not because the business is weak, but because fun

If you are building a startup in Michigan, fundraising can feel opaque—not because capital is unavailable, but because it comes in stages , each with its own logic, expectations, and tradeoffs. This post is meant to demystify those stages by explaining why they exist, what they are designed to fund, and how Michigan founders typically experience them. Rather than treating funding rounds as labels, it helps to see them as checkpoints in a company’s development. Each round answ