Investor Outlook | How did macroeconomic conditions affect the investment landscape in 2025?
This is the third story in an eight-part Investor Outlook series. This feature dives into how macroeconomic conditions affected investor appetites in 2025.
Over the next five weeks, eight venture capitalists, angel investors, and lenders from across Tennessee will provide insights in their own words, reflecting on 2025 and their plans for the new year.
This week’s question operates as a launch point for candid conversation about how macroeconomic conditions affected investor appetites in 2025, and predictions for how they will affect 2026.
Grady Vanderhoofven, Three Roots Capital
“I would say, our hope for 2026 would be that macroeconomic conditions and some perception of stability and predictability in the federal government create a situation that’s conducive to positive business growth in 2026. I think that’s a big hope, because there’s a fair amount of uncertainty right now, and companies perform better when there is less uncertainty.”
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Eric Dobson, Community Equity Partners
“Investors in 2025 were making smaller and smaller investments in fewer companies. For us, it was just one of those years where we had to focus on our existing portfolio. We added a few new companies, but there were fairly small investments. But that’s our process normally anyway.”
Learn more about Community Equity Partners.
Travis Manasco, Solas BioVentures
“As interest rates have gone down, there’s been more appetite for risk. There’s also been some rotation from kind of the AI frenzy, you know, or whatever we call it, into other sectors as well… In the earlier stages of the device world, there’s kind of a dearth. There’s not a lot of innovation, and who knows what the NIH cuts and the regulatory uncertainty will mean in the future.”
Learn more about Sola BioVentures.
Brandon Bruce, Market Square Ventures
“Our opinion on macroeconomics is that there are still always great founders starting. So, if you rewind the clock to well before we started Market Square Ventures, and look at 2008, which is generally known as the Great Recession, a very challenging time economically, you also see the emergence of some really great companies from that era. Companies like Uber, Instagram, and others emerged as great investments. So, as an early-stage investor, we stay bullish, and we’re always just looking for the best founders regardless of the overall climate.”
Learn more about Market Square Ventures.
Eller Kelliher, Invest Tennessee
“Investors have been doubling down on their existing portfolios, which I think has made it difficult for some startups in the state and in the region to be recipients of new capital. But, I don’t necessarily think deal flow is going to slow down in 2026. I think we’re going to keep seeing new companies and new market entrants. There’s always a flow of new startups in the state.”
Haley ‘Zap’ Zapolski, Lighthouse
“Investors will change what they do because of the market. But since I invest in early-stage founders, and I’ve never seen a founder change the business they’re building because of the market. That’s not really on the table, especially if they’re trying to solve a worthy problem. Because I hang out with founders, I’m more influenced to think in their mindset.”
Cam Doody, Brickyard
“Unless we’re fundraising for Brickyard, market liquidity doesn’t matter all that much. Probably the more applicable thing is that the fundraising market for founders at pre-seed has gotten very difficult. This year (2026), we’ll be raising our next fund. And so if the Fed starts dropping rates, and we start to see some macro easing, that’ll certainly make our job a little bit easier to speed up our close.”
Jay Shaffer, Atlanta Tech Angels, and Venture South
The economic uncertainty is bad for everybody. So there are a lot of projects on the side. Any company that had physical products had to go through the tariff reset. So that slowed up some progress there. For me, I’m a bottom-up guy. I look at the companies from the bottom up, not necessarily the top down. So the macroeconomic interest rates and things of that nature, I try not to pay as much attention to, especially for the early-stage companies that I deal with.”
Learn more about Atlanta Tech Angels.
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