Capital's harder to get, but personnel and real estate is cheaper if you get funded. And then while you develop, hopefully the market recovers, and there's cash available for subsequent rounds and with customers to buy your stuff.
And it really depends on who your customers are. The amount of cash available during a recession doesn't change. It just gets more sluggish and people tend to be more reluctant to let it go. But it's there all the same.
I don't know if people tend to be more reluctant to let it go, they just change where it goes. As an example, a company I worked at during the dot.com crash made a lot of bones in regulatory compliance until 9/11...at which point, redundancy and high availability became the money machine.