There's a version of the startup story that gets told constantly. Founder has idea. Founder raises money. Company grows fast. Company raises more money. Repeat until IPO or acquisition by a tech giant. The story ends with a number — a valuation, a multiple, a headline.

That story is true for a very small number of companies. Maybe 5-10% of the ones that ever raise venture capital, depending on how generous you're being with your definition of success.

The rest? They exist in what we've started calling the abandoned middle.

These are companies with real revenue. Real customers. Healthy gross margins. Teams that have been together for years. Products that genuinely solve problems. By most reasonable definitions, these are good businesses. Good businesses that happen to not fit the venture model anymore.

The venture model has a specific requirement: outlier growth. Not good growth. Not sustainable growth. Outlier growth. And the arrival of AI as the dominant investment theme has made that requirement even more extreme. When the portfolio darlings are compounding at 3-5x annually, everything else looks slow by comparison — even if "slow" means 15-20% year-over-year growth, in arecurring revenue business.

What's happened as a result is a quiet abandonment. Not dramatic. No press releases. Investors just... move on. The follow-on capital doesn't materialize. The board meetings get shorter. The founder, who built something real over five or six years, is left trying to figure out what comes next with minimal support from the people who were supposed to be partners.

The gap this creates

We've spoken with hundreds of founders in exactly this position. What strikes me most isn't the frustration, though there's plenty of that. It's the disorientation. These founders did what they were supposed to do. They built real products. They retained customers. They ran lean. And yet the system around them has essentially reclassified them as irrelevant.

The irony is that these businesses, the ones that grew carefully, that kept NRR strong, that didn't bloat their cost structure during the ZIRP years, are often more resilient than the high-flyers. They haven't been stretched. They haven't over-hired. They have customer relationships built on actual value delivery, not on a land-grab subsidized by cheap capital.

They just need a different kind of owner.

What a different kind of ownership looks like

At Curious, we've now made several acquisitions of companies that fit this profile exactly. Each time, the pattern is similar. The business looks worse on paper than it is in practice. The team is demoralized but talented. The product has real utility that's been underinvested in. The customer base is stickier than the growth metrics suggest.

Our approach — continuation and acceleration — isn't complicated. We don't come in with the intention to cut and burn. We come in with stability, capital, and a longer time horizon. We recommit to the product. We reinvest in the team. We remove the pressure that was never appropriate for this kind of business in the first place.

What happens next, consistently, is that the business starts to recover. Not because we're geniuses. Because the fundamentals were always there. They just needed the right conditions to express themselves.

Why this matters beyond Curious

The broader point isn't about us. It's about a structural gap in the market for technology companies that exists right now and will only grow as AI continues to reshape where venture capital flows.

There needs to be infrastructure — buyers, operators, capital — for the abandoned middle. Not because these businesses are charity cases. Because they're genuinely good businesses that deserve a fair outcome for the founders who built them, the teams who showed up, and the customers who depend on them.

The most interesting software companies right now aren't the ones raising $100M rounds. They're the ones quietly serving their customers, trying to figure out what chapter two looks like.

We think chapter two can be great in the midst of the rocket ships. We've seen it happen, and it's equally inspiring work.