Pre-Revenue Pre-Seed Startups Are Not Raising at Wild Valuations

Pre-Revenue Pre-Seed Startups Are Not Raising at Wild Valuations

Author

Peter Walker

|

Read time: 

1 minute

Published date: 

August 13, 2025

Real SAFE data for M raises shows -11M median valuation caps, not the outlier figures headlines feature—Mira Murati raises are exceptions, not the rule.

LinkedIn: Pre-Revenue Pre-Seed Startups Are Not Raising at Wild Valuations

Founders, deep breaths. It is NOT true that lots of pre-revenue startups are raising at massive valuations right now.

Does it happen? Sure, if you're Mira Murati and you used to be CTO at OpenAI.

But for the 𝘃𝗮𝘀𝘁 majority of founders, this is not real life. Even in SF. Even in AI.

Real data for pre-seed on post-money SAFEs:

  • Raising $1M? Median is $10M-$11M valuation cap

  • Raising $2M? $12M-$13M val cap

  • Raising $3M? $15M-$20M val cap

And ya, most all of these have revenue before these rounds.

Don't let the headlines skew your view of the actual market!

#startups #founders #preseed #prerevenue

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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