Pre-wind-down financial advisory for boards that want a model — not a press release. We build the recovery scenarios and the cap-table maths before the conversation gets hard.
Most boards reach out to a wind-down practice the week before the meeting. The best ones reach out three months before — when there is still time to model alternatives, negotiate with creditors, restructure venture debt, or quietly find a buyer for the IP. This is that engagement.
A pre-wind-down financial advisor exists to give the board a defensible, modeled view of every available path — before a public process commits the company to one. Our AI engine compresses what used to take a banker three weeks into one weekend.
Liquidation preferences, participation rights, ratchets, drag-along, and accrued dividends — modeled across multiple recovery scenarios. The board sees what each constituency actually receives at each transaction value.
What if the strategic buyer offers $4M instead of $7M? What if the secured creditor takes a haircut? What if you raise a $2M bridge? Real scenarios, modeled live, in your next board meeting.
We model what each major creditor — venture debt fund, landlord, key vendor — actually recovers in each path: ABC, Chapter 7, Chapter 11, restructure, equity-for-debt swap. They negotiate harder when they know what they'd actually get.
Two-week diagnostic: cap table audit, debt-stack inventory, IP-asset valuation, customer-contract review, employee retention modeling. We deliver a Board-ready memo with three to five forward paths and the modeled outcome of each.
If the path includes restructuring with a secured lender, a key vendor settlement, or an asset divestiture — we run that negotiation alongside management, with the modeling and AI-driven valuation that creditors cannot easily refute.
If the answer is a bridge round or restructure: we hand off to your bankers and counsel with a clean fact pattern. If the answer is a wind-down: we are already engaged — and we can elect into the ABC engagement letter without another round of diligence.
Founders who can see the runway ending and want to model the wind-down before they have to defend it to the board. We deliver a Triage AI memo and a Recovery Engine output that lets the founder walk into the meeting with options, not with apologies.
Boards facing a hard discussion. Independent directors carrying real fiduciary risk often want a financial advisor with no upside in the wind-down outcome — which we can be, because financial advisory is a fixed-fee engagement, separate from any subsequent wind-down work.
Lead investors watching a portfolio company drift. We work directly with VC operations partners and corporate development at the lead's request, with the founder's consent, to give the lead an independent read on recovery scenarios.
We are not a fundraising bank. We don't pitch you to investors. If the right answer is a bridge round, we'll tell you that — and we'll hand you a clean fact pattern that makes your existing bankers' job easier. We don't take retainers, we don't lock you into the wind-down assignee role on the back end, and we don't have any incentive to push you toward an ABC if a sale or restructure produces a better outcome for creditors and equityholders.
Critically — the financial advisory engagement does not lock you into a Graveyard.vc ABC. If the right answer is a sale, a bridge, or a restructure, we hand off cleanly. We have no incentive to steer you toward a wind-down.
Graveyard.vc was founded by Raj Abhyanker, who grew up in a family retail business in Phoenix and finished college and law school only after that family business wound down. He has launched dozens of companies since — and built this practice around the conviction that founders facing a wind-down deserve someone who has lived both sides of it. Read Raj's full bio →