When Should Debt Enter the Capital Stack? Hosted by Tangible with Eternal.ag, Prototype and Viola Credit
Equity Alone Built Software. What builds Physical AI?
Physical AI is brutally capital-intensive, yet founders often fund the asset-heavy part with the most expensive money they'll ever raise. We put a founder, a VC, and a private-credit lender on stage to show how the most capital efficient companies layer debt and equity together.
2026 sees growing capital demands for the numerous Physical AI companies scaling. Fleets, factories, deployments that equity isn’t designed to fund. Meanwhile, private credit sits on dry powder hunting for exactly this kind of asset-backed yield.
The debate isn't whether to use debt; it's how early you have to think about it. Most of the industry assumes you can bolt debt on later. But the decisions that make a company financeable have to be in place long before the raise, and delaying has high costs. The real tension is between the comfortable default of delay and the discipline of engineering for debt from day one.
Eternal.ag: Renji John - renjijohn
Viola Credit: Lauren Schaefer - lauren-schaefer-09aa3a152
Prototype: Andreas Klinger - andreasklinger
Tangible: William Godfrey - william-godfrey-927285110