Capital has a stated price. It is measured in valuation, dilution, governance rights and the obligations negotiated into a term sheet. Its less visible cost depends on whether a founder and an investor have answered the hard questions before the money arrives.
Jeff Halevy’s career in health, wellness and technology has involved businesses with different financing models. He describes Apex Human Performance as bootstrapped, Altis Movement Technologies as venture-backed, and Continuum as built within a private-capital structure.
An Apex-issued announcement states that Andrew Malkiel bought Apex Human Performance from Halevy in 2020. In April 2022, Altis announced additional financing of more than $3 million, bringing its total financing to date to $10.5 million. Its technology assets were sold to Academy Medtech Ventures in August 2023, as documented by transaction counsel Foley & Lardner. The announcement does not state the terms of the sale.
Halevy subsequently founded Continuum, a precision-health platform and wellness club, and stepped away from the company in 2026.
These experiences inform Halevy’s view that capital structure is not merely a fundraising decision. It is also an operating framework that influences how quickly a company can move and which risks it can absorb. The interview explores his perspective on matching financing arrangements to a business’s requirements and the founder’s objectives.
In the following Q&A, Halevy discusses what those structures made possible, where misalignment becomes expensive, and why he investigates prospective capital partners as carefully as they investigate him. The answers below, including the figures cited, reflect Halevy’s own account and views.
You have operated a bootstrapped business, a venture-backed technology company and a founder-led business within a private-capital structure. What did each model teach you?
Apex taught me the discipline of customer-funded growth. When you bootstrap, the market is your investment committee. Revenue funds the next hire, location, and idea, so there is nowhere to hide from the question of whether customers value what you built. That constraint can limit speed, but it creates clarity and operating discipline.
Altis had different requirements. We were building computer vision that could see and understand human movement, along with a specialized language model that prescribed adaptive exercise from physical therapy through elite performance. That required engineering talent, research, and time before the company could fully scale. Venture funding allowed us to pursue the opportunity faster than customer revenue alone would have allowed.
The trade-off is that venture capital introduces an institutional clock and a set of expectations around growth, follow-on funding, and liquidity. Those expectations can be appropriate for the business, but founders need to understand what accepting them means. Continuum was built inside a private-capital structure, which let us build the club and the precision-health platform to a finished standard from the start rather than staging them as revenue allowed.
You have described alignment as “the cost of capital that never appears on the term sheet.” Where does that cost surface?
It appears in delayed decisions, competing priorities, and disagreements about when to invest, conserve cash, raise again, or pursue a transaction. Capital can look inexpensive on paper and become extraordinarily expensive in practice if the people involved define success differently.
Founders naturally focus on valuation, dilution, board rights, and the size of the round. Those terms matter, but they do not tell you whether everyone is trying to build the same company on the same timeline. They also do not tell you what happens when circumstances change, and the original plan no longer fits the market.
Misalignment does not require a bad actor. Often, capable people enter a relationship without resolving the questions that mattered most. What is the expected time horizon? What happens if the company needs additional capital? Which commitments are binding? Who has authority when a consequential decision must be made quickly?
What does your investor diligence process look like now?
I diligence capital the way capital diligences me.
My first filter is alignment on the timeline. A founder and an investor can agree about the size of an opportunity and still be incompatible if one is preparing for a near-term transaction while the other intends to build for a longer horizon. Neither position is automatically wrong. The problem is discovering the difference after the documents are signed.
My second filter is that if future funding or support matters to the plan, both sides should know which are contractual and which are expectations and should document the ones that matter.
The third filter is control. It should rest with whoever is accountable for the outcome.
That does not mean looking for investors who never challenge the founder. Constructive disagreement can improve a company. The diligence question is how decisions will be made, who owns the final call, and whether the parties will still consider the process fair when they disagree.
Your personal health director practice charged a $100,000 annual retainer. What did that model teach you about customer demand?
I worked with a small roster of executives and public figures, connecting the information, professionals, and decisions surrounding their health. I will not discuss individual clients, but the practice demonstrated a willingness to pay for a genuinely integrated service at the individual extreme.
Those clients did not need another isolated expert or another data stream. They needed someone to determine what mattered, translate information across disciplines, and coordinate execution. The model worked, but it depended heavily on my time, judgment, and access. The business question was whether that result could be delivered by a scalable system rather than by a single person.
That is the problem I have been working on for nearly twenty years. The tools have become more sophisticated, but the commercial premise remains consistent: Information becomes valuable when it leads to a decision, and that decision leads to action.
For an investor, the lesson is that a high-touch service can do more than generate revenue. It can reveal what customers value before technology is used to expand the delivery model. In this case, the practice was not the final product. It was evidence that the underlying problem was real and that solving it carried economic value.
Whether that demand extends beyond a small group of affluent clients is the next question, and it depends on acquisition cost, delivery cost and retention.