Author: Declan Wraight

Declan Wraight spent the better part of a decade in and around private capital before he started filing copy. He read PPE at Trinity College Dublin, joined a Big Four transaction services group in London out of school, and learned how a leveraged cap table actually works by chasing covenant compliance for two years. He moved to corporate development at a London fintech in 2017, did three buy-side acquisitions, and watched one of them get marked to nothing inside eighteen months. He spent three years as an associate at a US growth-stage fund in San Francisco, sourcing and diligencing Series B and C deals across fintech and SaaS, before getting laid off in the spring 2023 venture contraction along with most of his cohort. He came home to Dublin and started writing. He covers the bits of the venture beat he actually knows: round structures, cap-table mechanics, secondaries, fund cycles, and the M&A that comes out the other end. Declan has read more SAFE agreements than is good for anyone. He has a working theory about why the 2021 vintage is going to underperform for the next decade, and treats most startup coverage as laundered LP marketing.