Seed Founders Need to Make Their Capital Last 1000 Days

Seed Founders Need to Make Their Capital Last 1000 Days

Author

Peter Walker

|

Read time: 

1 minute

Published date: 

December 12, 2025

With median time from seed to Series A now over 2 years, founders must extend runway well beyond 18 months—1,000 days has become the new target for...

LinkedIn: Seed Founders Need to Make Their Capital Last 1000 Days

Seed founders - can you last for 1,000 days?

Top job is never run out of money. Here are your choices:

1) Make a lot of revenue from customers at an ever-increasing pace

2) Reduce your burn

3) Raise money from external sources (not just VC, but often VC)

If you choose route 2...

  • You raise from seed VCs. Median raised is $3.5M-$4M at this point.

  • You then need to make that money last...how long?

It used to be standard advice that you'll raise primary funding rounds every 18-24 months. Often standard advice is wrong, but this specific line was pretty right!

But it's getting stale. The median time to Series A from Seed is now right at 2 years, but the trend is clearly headed longer.

So you gotta plan for worst-case. Maybe a decent benchmark right now is 1,000 days.

And don't plan on getting bridge financings. Hearing more and more founders these days sort of assume that the VCs will fund bridges if they need it and this is a 𝗿𝗶𝘀𝗸𝘆 assumption.

Don't run out of money --> stay in the game --> win, eventually.

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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