Seed Rounds Jumping From 20M Cap to 100M Cap Do Happen

Seed Rounds Jumping From 20M Cap to 100M Cap Do Happen

Author

Peter Walker

|

Read time: 

1 minute

Published date: 

October 8, 2025

Bay Area insiders occasionally see seed negotiations surge from M-M to over M, but these are exceptional outliers—not representative of the national market.

LinkedIn: Seed Rounds Jumping From 20M Cap to 100M Cap Do Happen

"Second time this week I've heard of a seed round starting at $20M-$30M valuation cap and ending at $100M+. Wild times"

Ya, this stuff happens — but rarely. And almost never outside of San Francisco.

I'm a fan of Hubert Thieblot and his work, to be clear (Founders, Inc. is his accelerator / incubator in SF and it is awesome).

But just because an SF insider is seeing crazy competition for deals does not mean founders should walk in to negotiations with these expectations in mind.

If you're raising a seed round on SAFEs, the expectation should probably be that the valuation cap starts between $15M-$20M (that's if you're raising $2M or so).

Don't get twisted up in wild headlines or narratives on X — most startups are not in this bubble.

And if you are in the bubble, enjoy the ride 🙏

#startups #founders #seed

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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