Founding Teams Own 35.6 Percent After Series A on Median

Pop quiz: after Series A, the median founding team owns ____% of the company?

35.6%?

Nailed it.

That number is consistently surprising to founders (and often to VCs) when we show them this data. The figure is from 9,304 startups that raised from 2023-2025 btw.

𝗧𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴𝘀 𝗪𝗼𝗿𝘁𝗵 𝗡𝗼𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴

• These are simply medians displayed across the cap table. Individual companies can have very different values for each group.

• Most people just forget to include the employee pool in these calculations but they shouldn't! Employees receive ownership too. Now if a pool is not fully utilized when an exit happens, some of that equity will very likely return to founders (boosting their final %).

• Raising rounds on SAFEs does not really minimize dilution - it simply delays it.

• AI companies see founding teams with slightly higher median ownership.

• Software companies typically have founders with more equity than hardware ones to start, but the dilution evens out by the late stages usually.

• Don't raise venture capital without understanding how dilutive the journey really is. You need a massive outcome to print the same economics if your ownership has been significantly reduced!

Good luck out there 🙏