Building the company for the long-term and focusing on things within our control is key. Oskari Saarenmaa Co-Founder & CEO, Aiven Aiven, like many growth companies, secured funding during fa- vorable market conditions. Now everyone’s focus is on product, customers and execution. Once markets regain momentum, we’ll be in a great position. As economist and investor Benjamin Graham put it: “In the short run, the market is a voting machine but in the long run, it is a weighing machine.” Average time between rounds is not yet extending While there has been much discussion about a potential extension of the average time between investment rounds as founders seek to delay returning to the market to raise additional capital, this hypothesis is yet to be re昀氀ected in publicly-disclosed data. This is likely due to the fact that companies that have had to elongate the time between their funding rounds have yet to come back to the market to raise capital in su昀케cient volume to impact the overall numbers. The companies that have had di昀케culty closing new rounds of investment or are simply waiting things out are, of course, not captured in the data. As of Q3 2023, the median time between rounds for growth stage companies has remained largely unchanged throughout the 昀椀ve-year reporting period, clocking in at an average of 23 months between consecutive rounds. For early stage companies, meanwhile, only a slight uptick in the median interval between investment rounds is visible in the data. 81 | Companies