SINCE 2025
Backable
Co-Founder
- The Room Where Deals Close
- Underestimated but Undeniable
- Luxury Positioning to Startup Capital
Fundraising Expert · Backable · NYU Stern MBA
Helena Fogarty
She pulls back the curtain on how founders actually close a round.
Helena Fogarty helps startup founders get funded. She is a fundraising expert. She hosts Inside Startup Funding podcast and coaches diverse founders to raise pre-seed through Series A. She raised $1.2M for her startup MI OLA; She's run a VC backed cpg brand; and now she's helped founders raise $16M via her 1-on-1 advisory in the past 2 years. A lifelong surfer, she lives in the Rockaway with her husband, daughter, and pooch—often in or on the water between May - October.
- $1.2M+Raised for Mi Ola swimwear
- 107Inside Startup Funding videos
- 4,000Retail doors: Whole Foods, Target
- 38Countries with Mi Ola customers
HAPPENING NOW
STANDING TODAY
SINCE 2025
Inside Startup Funding
Host
HOW THEY THINK4 BELIEFS
Four beliefs, each paid for in a real raise.
THE IMPACT
Companies built, rounds reconstructed, essays written — pull one out.
EVERYTHING ELSE · 8 WORKS
THE TIMELINE
Each ending became the next platform — from a nine-year swimwear company to the room where the deal gets done.
The whole record, newest first – tap any moment and Aster tells the story.
2025-PRESENT
Pulling back the curtain on startup funding
After a nine-year company failed, Helena turned the raise itself into her subject. In 2025 she launched Inside Startup Funding — Inside the Round for founders, Inside the Fund for investors — and co-founded Backable, coaching overlooked founders to close within six months. The Backable Brief carries the same thesis in writing.
“What happens in the room where the deal gets done?”
2022-2024
The transparency mission — coaching founders through the parts nobody talks about
Out of two back-to-back shutdowns, Helena trained as a coach and built a practice around radical transparency — 'the good parts and bad parts of entrepreneurship.' Working with diverse founders under the 'Force of Nature CEO' banner, she narrowed her focus from whole-person coaching toward the one thing founders found hardest: the raise.
“Here's my phone book, the good parts and bad parts of entrepreneurship.”
2010-2021
Building (and closing) consumer companies from Costa Rica to Whole Foods
A Great-Recession layoff sent Helena to Costa Rica, where a production company gave way to Mi Ola, the women's surf-swimwear brand she raised $1.2M for and sold in 38 countries before a seed round collapsed in 2019. Two weeks later she took over the cocoa company Cocomama — 4,000 retail doors, 300+ investors — and wound it down 'the right way.'
“I am a strong kick-ass entrepreneur, regardless of what the circumstances are.”
1996-2009
Twenty years learning to position premium value
Before founding anything, Helena spent two decades at the intersection of premium brand and the early internet — producing Harper's Bazaar and CosmoGirl websites at Hearst, analyzing finance at Zac Posen, and running wholesale strategy at Chanel until a 2009 layoff. Her NYU Stern finance MBA and that 'position premium value' instinct became the spine of everything after.