True partners to startup founders and CEOs
We clear the blockers between where you are and where you want to go.
Not a report, not a deck. We work shoulder to shoulder: set the course, spot what’s actually in the way, and clear it. Across hundreds of companies we’ve learned where the obstacles hide, so you move faster: grow the business, close the round, get where you’re going.
The decisive moments
Hard work isn’t what decides it.
Beyond the grind, a company’s outcome gets decided in a handful of decisive moments. Founders meet them once, blind, with everything riding on the call. We’ve lived, coached, and studied the same moments across hundreds of companies. You walk in holding the map, so you meet the moment with an expert’s judgment instead of your best guess.
What you keep
Most founders learn this over three companies. You’ll do it in one.
The skills that usually take a decade to build, you’ll have by the time this round closes: what to say to a board, how to read a room, which objection is the real one, when to push and when to wait. You’ll walk into the next raise ahead of founders who have been at this far longer, and you keep it for the life of the company.
What we do
The company, the raise, and you.
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Strategy
Optimize the company to be venture-investable. Investors have a pattern for what they’ll fund. We find where your company doesn’t fit, and we close the gap while there’s still time.
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The Raise
Positioning, narrative, and choreography. The story that fits their model, the spec for who actually writes the check, and the scripts for every high-stakes moment from intro to close.
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Coaching
The parts nobody else has a playbook for. The hard calls, the board, the team, and how you come across when it counts.
The gap
Keeping your doubts to yourself doesn’t solve them.
Your board is judging you every time you speak. Your team needs you certain. Your investors sit across the table. And the doubts on your mind are the most important things to work on. They’re also the ones you can’t say out loud to anyone. We’ve sat in that seat. You can be completely straight with us about the business, the strategy, the team, your own gaps, and the path ahead. Then we go to work on clearing the way.
Who we work with
A short client list, on purpose.
Venture-track CEOs, seed through Series C, with a real business and a milestone that matters in the next 3 to 18 months. Our best work happens with founders in growth mode: coachable, fast-moving, willing to change how they lead and how they present in order to win. You work directly with the two of us, so the client list stays short.
Who we are
Ben Elowitz & Dennis Capovilla.
The co-founders of Next Level Strategic Partners. Between us, we’ve founded companies, run them as CEO, taken them public, and sold them. We’ve guided 70+ raises from the other side of the table, and we’ve invested in dozens of companies. You work with both of us, directly.
Clients, in their words
“Ben and Dennis hunted for the limiters in our business. They identified the blockers, helped us bring in the right expertise, and worked with us on a practical plan to drive results. Their approach was hands-on, targeted, and refreshingly free of academic consulting-speak. The work totally contributed to stronger commercial execution and helped position the company for the strategic interest that followed.”
“Ben and Dennis are a uniquely powerful team. In the trenches partnership attitude, quick to real insights, not satisfied unless they are driving real impact and fun to work with to boot. I can’t recommend them highly enough.”
“There was no playbook for financing Aston. Some people saw an infrastructure project, some saw a startup, and our capital options ran from project finance to hard money lending to crypto to venture capital. Ben and Dennis worked with us over several months to shape and close on a capital strategy that let us build the company we need to build for our customers, not one that fit into a pre-existing underwriting box.”
The data and the inside track
We track what the top raisers do.
Across 100+ fundraises, founder interviews, and podcast episodes combined: the patterns behind who gets funded, and why.
The Raiser’s Edge
Interviewing top founders and venture investors to reveal what the best fundraisers do to get a capital advantage.
Newest three episodes
Sujal Patel on charisma, curiosity, and fine-tuned calibration
$500M+ raised · Nautilus Bio, Isilon
How he closed a $76M Series B in six weeks of COVID lockdowns, and the “dumb questions of the day” habit that made him fluent in a field he’d never worked in.
Ep. 12 · Jun 2026
Kevin Bennett on how you build a trust dividend
$200M+ raised · Caribou, Further
Why naming your own risks builds the confidence investors need to fund something unproven. It’s how he raised $200M in categories VCs overlooked.
Ep. 11 · Jun 2026
Sean Byrnes on the story VCs actually want to hear
$100M+ raised · Flurry, Outlier
How to read an investor’s bias before the first meeting, who to skip entirely, and why you get two minutes at the top of the pitch to earn the room.
The research program
Our research examines how venture-backed companies win their markets, across dozens of categories and over 250 companies. We detail every move, every dollar raised, and every outcome: revealing the winning moves, and the circumstances in which each one works.
The clock is already running.
Doing nothing is the expensive option. Make the call to raise your trajectory.