Fortune Got It Wrong 100M Seed Rounds Are Not Normal

Fortune Got It Wrong 100M Seed Rounds Are Not Normal

Author

Peter Walker

|

Read time: 

1 minute

Published date: 

April 17, 2026

Only 0.7% of seed rounds and 2.5% of Series A rounds exceeded $100M last year—media conflates exceptional outliers with the actual fundraising market.

LinkedIn: Fortune Got It Wrong 100M Seed Rounds Are Not Normal

Fortune recently published this ridiculous headline:

"$100M+ funding rounds used to be incredibly rare. Now, 40% of seed and Series A rounds are clearing that bar".

...um, no they aren't? Not even close?

Data below on how much is raised in seed and Series A rounds over the last year.

0.7% of seed rounds cleared $100M. A whopping 2.5% of Series A rounds hit that number.

Now maaaybe what Fortune actually meant was "40% of the money invested into these stages is flowing through rounds of $100M+". That is still not correct based on our data but it's slightly closer to reality.

No wonder founders have a skewed view of what today's market really looks like.

Massive capital raises at early stages are happening and more than they used to. But they remain a tiny percentage of the venture-backed market. Ignore the headlines 😁

Peter Walker
Author: Peter Walker
Peter Walker runs the Insights team at Carta, focused on discovering key data and narratives across the private capital ecosystem. In a former life, he was a marketing executive for a media analytics startup and led the data visualization team at the Covid Tracking Project.

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