SAFE Valuation Cap Benchmarks From 15000 Post-Money SAFEs

New SAFE benchmarks—share with your favorite fundraising founders.

This breaks down one of the more finicky topics founders face while using SAFEs: what should my valuation cap be?

We looked at 15,000+ post-money SAFEs signed in 2023 (using post-money here as that's by far the most common SAFE type). All US companies (apologies to international SAFE users).

So - what's the biggest factor in deciding on your valuation cap?

Turns out, it's the round size that matters most. More than industry, more than location, more than any other exogenous factor (repeat vs first-time founder also very important).

If you're raising under $250K, a valuation cap of $20M is incredibly rare. If you're raising more than $5 million, a valuation cap of $20M is downright common.

Medians for round size | valuation cap:

• Under $250K  |  $5M val cap

• $250K-$499K  |  $7M val cap

• $500K-$999K  |  $9M val cap

• $1M-$2.4M  |  $12M val cap

• $2.5M-$4.9M  |  $19M val cap

• $5M+  |  $30M val cap

A couple things become clear at a glance here:

1. Founders are using SAFEs to raise angel rounds, pre-seed rounds, seed rounds, even what used to be considered Series A rounds. So segmenting this data by round size has only gotten more important over the years

2. Founders who choose to raise SAFEs at multiple valuation caps are considered to have raised multiple SAFE rounds. It's fairly common, but can have significant impacts to founder dilution down the road. I'm not saying don't do it - just don't do it blindly.

Love seeing so many founders take advantage of Carta Launch (free cap table until you raise your first million bucks) which comes with SAFE creation tools out of the box!

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