Does an online business actually need funding to go anywhere

Online it looks like everyone raises. I have no idea what the real share is, since the ones who didn't raise don't write about it. I'm not talking about hardware or anything traditional. More like SaaS, marketplaces, media sites, tools. The kind of thing you can build and run yourself. Feels like most of the money right now is chasing AI hardware and infra, so raising for something like this seems like a long shot anyway. So for people who've shipped something real, did you raise? And if you didn't, did that actually hold you back?