founder

Fifteen years for this

The cheapest money you will ever raise is already inside your business.

By Samer Azar, Fractional CFO · 2026-06-27 · 5 min read

Key Takeaway: The cheapest money you will ever raise is the cash already trapped inside your own business. Most founders reach for sales, a loan, or a raise, and skip the one source that is cheapest and fully in their control. This is why I built Alex the CFO, what fifteen years taught me about it, and why I am opening it to a founding group of twenty.

Dear reader,

Last year I joined a company that sells to both businesses and consumers. It was burning forty thousand euros a month and leaning on its shareholders to keep going.

My first instinct was the one I have had for years: before we talk about raising anything, let me look at the cash you already have.

Within a week, asking simple questions and reading the bank, the receivables, and the payables, we found more than a hundred thousand euros.

That is real money, the kind that lands back in your bank account and lets you breathe.

It came from none of the usual places: It was sitting inside the business the whole time, trapped in the gap between when money left and when it came back.

Freeing it bought them runway and cut their reliance on shareholder money, which is the most expensive kind there is.

Ask a founder how to get more cash and the answer is almost always the same: we need

• more sales,

• or a loan,

• or to raise.

Those can all be true.

What most founders are never told is that the order matters.

You start with the cheapest lever inside your own control, and you pull it first. Do that with discipline, week after week, and something quiet and powerful happens. Internal cash flow starts to compound, and the business begins to fund its own growth.

Keep at it and you join a different class of company, the ones that understand the levers of cash and design themselves around them.

Do it well enough and you become an Airbnb or a Facebook.

Even if you never do, the discipline alone was worth it.

Fifteen years for this

I co-founded AltCity in the heart of Beirut, an incubator and accelerator, back before startups were really a thing where I am from.

I have sat with founders at the very beginning, when the dream is bigger than the bank account and every decision feels heavy.

Later I built Alex the CFO to give those founders real financial leadership, the kind an accountant was never there to provide.

In all those years I watched dozens of companies die.

Almost never because the product was bad. They died because nobody could see how cash was moving through the business until it had already moved out.

I made it my work to carry that knowledge for them, and I have wanted to hand every founder the same edge that big companies simply buy.

The technology was never ready.

Now it is.

Who I am building for

I am building for the founder who is carrying too much. Who is ambitious and wants to grow.

Who wants to provide for their family, be a fair steward to the suppliers who trust them, and sleep well at night knowing the numbers are handled.

The founder who cannot afford a CFO and should not have to drown without one.

My commitment to you is simple. We go behind the scenes and read your numbers properly.

We watch hundreds of signals in the background, and we surface only the few moves that actually matter, the ones that take you an inch closer to what you are building toward.

No noise, no dashboards to interpret, just the next right move every week.

Every one with a single job: to put more cash back in your bank account.

The invitation

This is why I am opening Alex the CFO to a founding group of twenty.

I am looking for builders, not customers in the usual sense, people who want to help shape this in its earliest days, who want to stand at the front of what this technology can do in finance, who will build their own company's context and put it in the hands of the most capable AI in the world, so that together we find out what it is capable of.

I will be honest with you.

It is early, and it is rough in places.

That is what a founding cohort is for.

What I can promise is that you will work directly with the people building it, on something we believe is a real shift in what a small company can afford to know about itself.

We are offering it for a small fraction of what the same work costs from a human team.

However you run the numbers, the return is not close.

Where this goes is bigger than a weekly email: A full team of financial agents.

An AI CFO whose only job is to help you make more cash.

That is what we are building toward, and the founding twenty get there first.

What a time to build. What a time to see how far this can go.

Take care of your cash, and it takes care of almost everything else.

Samer

P.S. If you are profitable on paper but your cash is stuck in stock you have not sold and invoices you have not been paid for, you are exactly who I built this for. The first twenty spots are open, and I would love for you to be one of them.

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