Behind the CFO’s capital strategy mandate

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It’s simple: Growth-stage companies need capital to fuel their ambitions. The not-so-simple part, of course, is securing that capital. And it’s largely up to the CFO to determine the best timing to raise funding, which sources to tap, and how to tailor their message to investors.

As Mark O’Connor, CFO of Cloudsmith, explained to CFO Brew, the finance chief has to “marry [an organization’s] cash needs with the market dynamics” and determine a good time to raise capital and who to raise it from.

Private funding sources are robust enough that “companies no longer need to be in the public markets to access capital like they once did,” Ro Sokhi, a partner at UHY, recently told CFO Brew.

Terawatt Infrastructure, a builder of autonomous vehicle charging infrastructure, plans to raise lots of capital in the near term to meet ambitious growth objectives.

Sujoy Haldar, Terawatt’s CFO, told us the company will invest “$3 billion to $5 billion over the next few years.” The company recently secured $300 million in debt financing.

Acquiring real estate and developing charging infrastructure for its customers “will take a lot of capital,” he said. That’s why “introducing Terawatt to the investor base…both on the debt side and the equity side” is a high priority for Haldar.

Highly concentrated. Private markets show signs of strength, but fundraising success is “very specific to the company,” O’Connor said.

“The better the company you are [and] the better performance you’ve had, the easier it is to raise,” he said. “And so, it kind of depends on the conditions of the company and the markets [it’s] serving.”

Venture capital started 2026 on pace “for the most new funds and most cash raised” since Q1 2022, according to Carta’s latest VC Fund Performance report. Private equity activity, meanwhile, went into the new year on a high note. “Buyouts surged, exits rebounded, and initial public offerings (IPOs) reemerged” in 2025, according to McKinsey’s Global Private Markets Report.

The bulk of VC investment activity this year, though, has centered on a handful of deals. VC activity was a record-breaker based on topline figures alone, though for companies not named OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX, according to PitchBook’s VC midyear update, “liquidity has remained low.” AI is driving VC activity, and the success of AI companies’ mega-IPOs will set future investor interest, according to the report.

Capital strategy. O’Connor advised Cloudsmith, a software supply chain security platform, on its last three venture financings, including a recent $72 million Series C, before becoming its full-time CFO.

For Cloudsmith, it was “very comfortable to raise” money in the Series C, O’Connor said. Its inside investors approached Cloudsmith to put even more in, before it needed to raise money. He credits the relative ease of fundraising to “a lot of hard work and labor from everybody else at the company, building [the] product, selling to customers, delivering to customers, etc.”

Part of Haldar’s job is explaining what Terawatt does to investors, who are “definitely looking for interesting places to deploy capital,” he said.

Since Terawatt is in “an extremely new asset class,” Haldar said, he sometimes has to familiarize investors with the sector itself—especially if they’ve not had direct exposure to autonomous rideshare.

He also has to explain Terawatt’s business model. It acquires and develops charging sites, signing long-term contracts that “produce steady cash flows,” Haldar explained.

“So on the one hand, you’re telling the story about this being an extremely new asset class, but one that will be rapidly growing and will become the next big thing…and then you layer in the fact that our business model actually gives them what they want, which is access to steady cash flows over an extended period of time,” he said.

Haldar summarized his investor-relations task as “really, sort of marrying up the narrative with the fundamentals of the business, which are really, really solid.”