How to Match Your Funding Ask to the Right Instrument — The BEJ Instrument Ladder Explained
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One of the most common reasons founders get turned down for capital has nothing to do with their business. It’s a size mismatch.
A $500K ask sent to a fund writing $1M–$3M checks gets passed on for structural reasons, not merit. A $50K ask sent to a DFI facility with a $500K floor never gets read. The instrument was wrong before the conversation started.
The BEJ Instrument Ladder is a framework we built to solve this — matching your ask to a disclosed check size across the facilities we track each month.
How it works:
- Every facility in the September issue carries a disclosed check size or range
- The Instrument Ladder organizes them from $5,000 to $5.5 million
- You find your ask size, identify the matching instruments, and move to eligibility
It is not a guarantee. It is a filter — designed to eliminate the wrong conversations before you have them.
The full Instrument Ladder, alongside the Deadline Calendar and all eight beats, is in the September issue of Global Capital Opportunities.