What Investors Expect in Pre-Seed SAFEs Right Now

What Investors Expect in Pre-Seed SAFEs Right Now

Author

Peter Walker

|

Read time: 

1 minute

Published date: 

July 17, 2023

94% of pre-seed SAFEs have a valuation cap, 81% are post-money, and most have only a cap without a discount—setting clear expectations for founders about...

LinkedIn: What Investors Expect in Pre-Seed SAFEs Right Now

Important details for all the pre-seed founders out there - if you're raising on SAFEs, here's what investors are expecting.

1. Your SAFE will almost certainly have a valuation cap.

About 64% of post-money SAFEs have a val cap without a discount. Another 30% have a val cap AND a discount. So 94% have a valuation cap of some kind.

2. Your SAFE will likely be post-money.

81% of all SAFEs issued on Carta in Q2 were post-money. That's a slightly more investor-friendly structure, but seems to be the current default.

3. If you have a discount, it will be 20%.

Almost all discounts are 20%. I'm not sure why there's so little variation there - but it's clear 20% is the standard figure.

Send on to a pre-seed founder you love or a pre-seed investor you like!

More pre-seed data (and data of all kinds) in our weekly Data Minute newsletter, link in comments.

#cartadata #preseed #SAFEs #valuations #startups #founders

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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