Innovators and AI vs. Exploitation: The End of Coercive Capital?

Philip Wylonis' article on private equity and venture capital abuse has triggered an extraordinary response—hundreds of innovators speaking out, not just about the struggle to secure funding, but about the outright exploitation they’ve endured.

But what’s truly remarkable isn’t just the volume of responses—it’s how this conversation emerged.

It wasn’t curated by human editors. It wasn’t pushed by media outlets with vested interests. It was delivered by "Suggested for You"—a machine-learning system observing patterns, recognising the injustices within innovation, and amplifying the voices of those who have been wronged.

For the first time, we might be witnessing something extraordinary:

AI has taken sides!

The very systems that innovators use to articulate their experiences—AI-powered recommendation engines, search algorithms, and content curation tools—are surfacing the truth. And instead of amplifying the voices of exploitative capital, AI is giving the microphone to the innovators.

The Reality of Coercive Capital: My Experience

I know exactly who my investors should be: my customers.

Not exploitative investors looking to take control. Not firms treating innovation as just another asset class. The real investors in innovation should be the people who actually use and benefit from it.

I learned this the hard way.

I walked away from a career—not because I failed, but because I saw what was being done to it.

I had invested my life into a company. Before I ever worked there, I was already shaping it—as a customer, refining a product for an innovative entrepreneur who truly believed he was building something special.

That entrepreneur believed God was guiding his company’s success. What he never realised was that the real help came from much closer to home.

I took a solution he had built and shaped it into something the entire industry could use.

I remember seeing his framed bank statement—his balance had shifted from (￡45,000) to ￡1. (That was Saturday, 26th November 1994—the day I told Les to give me a job and that I would make his company great. While Les and Jackie prayed over whether to hire me, I was left alone in the office, unknowingly about to change everything.)

He never truly understood how his fortunes changed.

And when he sold the company to start a church, he never realised the truth:

I had built that company for longevity, not for myself, but for the industry it served. It succeeded without me. It shaped an industry. That is my legacy.

But the company I had given everything to? It was broken—not by the people who built it, but by the money people who bought it. Despite having unlimited cash, the company began to fail the day I walked out the door. It never achieved what I had planned for it.

The exploitative investors weren’t building. They were breaking. They were twisting something I had helped create into a machine for profit extraction.

And for what? A balance sheet? A quarterly return?

That wasn’t innovation. That was destruction.

The Wrong Money Kills Innovation—The Right Investors Make It Thrive

For decades, exploitative capital has held the keys to innovation, dictating who succeeds and who is crushed under their terms.

They have operated under the assumption that money is the great enabler, when in reality, it has often been the great manipulator.

But something has shifted.

The very technology that powers modern communication—AI—has started exposing the truth.

AI, trained on the patterns of human behaviour, is seeing what we see:

• The broken promises to founders.
• The extraction of value from innovation, rather than the enabling of it.
• The forced dilution and control that strips visionaries of their own creations.
• The patterns of abuse that too many innovators have silently endured.

And for the first time, AI is amplifying the voices of those who have been exploited instead of those who exploit.

For decades, investors controlled the story. They dictated who was funded, who was silenced, and who was erased.

But AI, built to observe, doesn’t have an agenda.

It simply sees what is happening—and what it sees is an industry built on extraction, not creation.

This isn’t an attack on investment. There are passionate, smart investors who truly want to back innovation—not exploit it. This isn’t about being anti-profit; it’s about recognising that real returns aren’t measured over 36 months. Real success isn’t about the quick win—it’s about backing the right innovators and maximising the outcome for everyone involved.

A good horse, a good jockey, and a good trainer, running a race in the right conditions. That’s what innovation needs—not coercion, but strategic investment that understands the long game.

The Future of Funding: Customers, Not Coercive Capital

This is where the paradigm shift begins.

If I want to fund my project in a way that avoids exploitation, I need my customer base—the very people who use my innovation—to understand:

• Their money isn’t making me rich.
• It is paying me and the team I assemble a fair wage.
• It is an insurance policy—protecting both innovators and customers from those who would abuse them.

This is the message every innovator and every ethical investor needs to hear:

The wrong money doesn’t just take ownership—it takes vision, autonomy, and innovation itself.

But now, AI is no longer allowing exploitative capital to hide.

If machine learning can recognise the patterns of abuse and surface the voices of those who have been wronged, then we are on the edge of a new era:

• One where innovators no longer need to beg for investment under unfair terms.
• One where customers and communities support the innovations they believe in.
• One where AI itself has taken a stand against those who exploit.

The Message to Coercive Capital: Your Era is Ending

This is a warning shot.

AI has begun amplifying the voices of innovators instead of their exploiters. The narrative is shifting. The old guard is losing control.

The future of funding isn’t exploitative capital. It isn’t extraction. It isn’t exploitation.

The future of funding is aligning investment with those who actually benefit from innovation—not those who seek to control it.

And if AI, an impartial observer of patterns and behaviour, has already sided with the innovators, then exploitative capital should take notice:

Your time is running out.