Capital without integrity is not investment. It is extraction.
Thucydides understood power. But he never had to raise a Series A.
In 2025, two deals landed on my desk. A New York venture fund offering north of ten million dollars. A globally recognized, Gates-backed grant program offering $225,000. Both arrived at a moment when RxAll needed capital to scale — millions of patients depending on our AI drug authentication platform, new markets demanding expansion, and a pipeline of partnerships waiting to be fueled.
I killed them both.
Not because the money was wrong. Because the people behind it could not survive the same scrutiny they demanded of me.
The Venture Fund That Could Not Withstand a Simple Question
The term sheet arrived from a New York-based fund. The headline number was attractive. The managing partner spoke the language of partnership — long-term alignment, shared vision, strategic collaboration. We signed.
Then I did what every founder should do before handing over governance rights: I asked for references from three portfolio companies.
The response was not cooperation. It was aggression. Threatening emails. Legal posturing. Our access to the data room was revoked within twenty-four hours.
So we escalated our diligence. Our legal counsel conducted a full regulatory review. What we found should concern every founder in the venture ecosystem.
The fund’s entities did not appear in any SEC filings or Form D disclosures. The SPV named in the term sheet was not registered in New York or Delaware. The managing partner’s professional credential — which he prominently displayed to establish authority — was inactive. Two of their listed “portfolio companies” shared the same office address and overlapping executive members as the fund itself. Dozens of portfolio companies were in various stages of legal dispute with this fund.
When we reported these findings to our existing investors, one confirmed they had checked the fund on PitchBook, found it appeared credible on the surface, and called the underlying reality “quite a surprise.”But PitchBook does not tell you if that investor circling you is a vulture about to turn you into a carcass.
We terminated the term sheet. They threatened litigation. Our counsel responded with a detailed letter outlining every regulatory gap, every inconsistency, every red flag. The threats went quiet.
The Grant That Took Everything Except the Check
The second deal was slower but equally corrosive.
A Gates-backed program approached us. They conducted months of diligence — reviewing our financials, our operational data, our impact metrics. They selected us. They publicly announced us as a grant recipient. They used our name and logo in their program marketing and ecosystem communications.
They asked me to travel to Nairobi for a two-day meeting. I went — disclosing a personal health issue to accommodate their timeline. Out-of-pocket costs exceeded five thousand dollars.
Then the contract arrived.
They insisted on withholding tax provisions that do not apply to a U.S.-incorporated entity under a W-9. They refused to adjust deliverable targets to account for the reduced net amount. We negotiated in good faith for over a month. We offered multiple compromise paths. We proposed calls to align on terms they had previously accepted verbally.
Their response: a new code of conduct clause, a characterization of our requests as “too demanding and disrespectful,” and a unilateral decision to walk away.
They kept the brand value of having announced our name. They refused to reimburse our documented legal expenses, our travel costs, or the hundreds of hours we invested in their process. They offered no formal documentation of the termination.
Meanwhile, we had already hired three new staff members and invested twenty thousand dollars in product improvements — all in preparation for a grant that had been publicly announced and, in every reasonable expectation, was proceeding.
The Lesson: Due Diligence Is a Two-Way Street
These were not isolated incidents. They were symptoms of a structural problem in how capital flows to high-impact ventures — particularly those building at the frontier of AI, health, and financial infrastructure.
The venture ecosystem asks founders to open their books, expose their vulnerabilities, and submit to months of scrutiny. That is reasonable. What is not reasonable is that the scrutiny only flows in one direction.
Every founder must therefore do the following:
A. Verify entity registrations. Before you sign a term sheet, confirm that the investing entity exists in the state where it claims to be formed. Check the Secretary of State database. It takes five minutes.
B. Check SEC and Form D filings. Any legitimate fund raising capital from limited partners must file with the SEC. If there is no filing, that is not a technicality. It is a structural red flag.
C. Speak to portfolio companies directly. Do not accept curated references. Ask for three. If the fund resists, you have your answer.
D. Scrutinize grant terms, protect your IP & ensure the money is in the bank before lending your name. If a program announces you as a recipient and uses your brand in their marketing, that is a commitment — not a placeholder. Ensure the contract reflects the same terms that were communicated publicly. Ensure the money they promised you is in the bank before spending any dime of your own money traveling to their events. Ensure your IP is protected so that they do not share your IP and trade secrets that you created through sweat and blood over decades to the smaller startups in their program. Do not offer any good faith to any of these grant providers. They are in the business of grants and expanding their own fundriaisng engine and will do anything, even destroy you, to keep their grant-raising engine going.
E. Document everything & be willing to sue. Every email. Every expense. Every promise made in good faith. When deals collapse, documentation is the only thing that separates your narrative from theirs. In business there are no permanent friends, only permanent interests. And when you develop a reputation for being soft, the sharks will feed off you. Be gentle as a dove, but be willing to bite as hard as a lion if the people who parade as helpers decide to turn you into a carcass to feed off. Have your counsel close and sue for damages and reparations when you are ready. Don’t let any offense go unanswered.If you see any of their so-called investees copying your trade secrets go after them – you pay too much in blood to let people who don’t build anything get away with ruining your work.
F. Be willing to walk away. This is the hardest lesson. When you need capital, every deal feels like the last deal. It never is. The founders who survive are not the ones who take every offer. They are the ones who know which offers to kill.
The Builders Who Endure
I did not walk away from ten million dollars because I could afford to. I walked away because the cost of staying would have been higher than the cost of leaving.
Capital that compromises your governance is not investment. It is a hostile takeover disguised as a handshake. Grants that extract your credibility without delivering on their commitments are not philanthropy. They are reputation arbitrage.
RxAll now serves millions of patients monthly. StorsApp has deployed over four million dollars in working capital with a zero-loss rate. Frontières Bay Energies is building solar cold chain solutions where the grid has failed.
None of this was built with reckless capital. It was built with discipline, discernment, and the willingness to say no.
Not all money is good money. Some money costs more than it pays.
Build accordingly.
Onwards.
Adebayo Alonge is the Founder and Group CEO of RxAll Group. A Harvard Kennedy School Mason Fellow, Yale School of Management alumnus, and MIT Legatum Fellow, he builds AI-powered platforms that deliver healthcare, capital, and clean energy to underserved markets worldwide. He has raised $11M+ from Tier 1 VCs, driven $180M+ in product sales, and serves millions of patients monthly. He is a Fast Company World Changing Ideas 2025 honoree and winner of the Hello Tomorrow DeepTech Prize.
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