The week your round closes: a credit checklist

Closing a round is the single largest event in your credit eligibility, and it is the moment founders are least able to think about credit eligibility. The week is full of signatures, announcements and hiring plans, and the fact that a dozen programs just changed tier for you does not make the list.

Worse, some of those programs have a clock tied to the round itself. Wait long enough and a tier you qualified for on closing day quietly closes.

Here is the fortnight, in order.

First: the ones with a clock on the round

Two programs measure your eligibility against how recently you raised, not merely whether you did.

Google Cloud, Scale and AI-First tiers. Eligibility runs from pre-seed to Series A, and if you are Series A the round must have closed within the last twelve months. A Series A company that waits eighteen months to apply is not applying at a lower tier — it is outside the criteria.

AWS Activate, portfolio tiers. The larger tiers are routed through Activate Providers and the strongest position is a recent raise, so this is worth doing while your investor relationship is new and the introduction is easy to ask for.

These two go first. Everything else can wait a fortnight; these have dates attached.

Second: ask your investor one question

Not "can you introduce us to AWS". The question is:

Which credit and perk programs are you an approved partner for?

Every fund and accelerator has a list, and it is longer than the one on their website. The answer unlocks, at minimum: the AWS Activate tier your affiliation entitles you to, Cloudflare Tiers 2 and 1 (both require funding from an affiliated partner), HubSpot's 90% tier, Modal's Seed-to-Series-A track, Datadog, Perplexity, Linear, and the larger GitHub allocations.

Ask once, in writing, in the first week — while you are the newest and most interesting company in the portfolio. Investor relations teams answer this question quickly because it is one of the few asks that costs them nothing.

Third: the tier jumps, in value order

Now work the programs where your new position is worth the most. Approximate order of value:

Google Cloud. Scale covers 100% of usage up to $100,000 in year one plus 20% of usage up to another $100,000 in year two. If AI is the core technology of your primary product, the AI-First tier adds up to $150,000 on top, reaching $350,000 — the largest published ceiling available to a Seed-to-Series-A company anywhere on our database. One condition to check first: you must not have received more than $5,000 in Google Cloud credits previously.

Cloudflare. $100,000 if you are under $5M raised with an affiliated partner; $350,000 at $5M+ with an affiliated partner. First-time applicants only, twelve-month window, no extensions. If you claimed the $10,000 bootstrapped tier earlier, this door is closed — which is the whole argument for sequencing.

AWS Activate. Up to $200,000, through your provider affiliation, redeemable on third-party models through Bedrock.

Neon. Up to $200,000 in combined Neon and Databricks credits on the venture-backed track, against up to $1,000 self-funded. Requires at least $1M raised or a recognized accelerator. Twelve months from acceptance.

HubSpot. 90% off year one, 50% year two, 25% year three, for pre-seed through Series A with an approved partner or funding verifiable on Crunchbase or PitchBook. Series B and later do not qualify at all, so this is a use-it-now program. Applies to net-new Professional or Enterprise products with an annual commitment.

Anthropic. Institutional equity funding is what unlocks the credits, alongside being founded within the last four years and not having claimed before.

Modal. The Seed-to-Series-A track opens with a partner-network VC or over $1M raised.

Fourth: update the things reviewers check

Your company changed this week, and every application above gets screened on the same signals. Before submitting anything:

• Funding is reflected on your website and LinkedIn, and findable on Crunchbase if you want HubSpot's top tier without a partner route.
• Incorporation documents and a funding confirmation are in one folder, ready to attach.
• Headcount is current, because several programs have employee ceilings — Notion under 100, Linear under 50, ElevenLabs under 25.
• The site still reads as a product company, not a services company. Why this matters more than it should.

Fifth: write down the expiry dates

You are about to activate several twelve-month windows in the same fortnight, which means they will all expire in the same fortnight next year — and that will be a busier week than this one.

Put every expiry in a shared calendar with the carve-outs written next to it, and set a reminder at 60% of each window. The month after a large cloud credit ends is the month your infrastructure bill appears at full price on production traffic. That transition is where most of this value is actually lost.

What not to do

Do not submit everything in one evening. Several of these programs are one-shot, all of them screen on details, and a fortnight of sequencing is worth more than an evening of enthusiasm.

And do not claim a program before you can consume it. A twelve-month credit awarded in the week your round closes, against a product that will not carry real load for eight months, is worth a third of its headline. Applying deliberately is not caution — it is arithmetic.

If you want the ordered list for your own situation, send us four facts and we will come back with one.