Recent Seed Cohorts Are Graduating to Series A Faster

Recent Seed Cohorts Are Graduating to Series A Faster

Author

Peter Walker

|

Read time: 

1 minute

Published date: 

December 18, 2025

Startups that raised their seed rounds in 2024 are graduating to Series A faster than the 2023 cohort—a positive trend after years of declining graduation...

LinkedIn: Recent Seed Cohorts Are Graduating to Series A Faster

Exciting news: more startups are getting over the hump between Seed and Series A.

More specifically, I mean recent seed cohorts are graduating to Series A at a higher clip.

𝗛𝗼𝘄 𝘁𝗼 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗿𝘁:

  • First column is when the startup raised its seed round

  • Black dot = percent of the cohort that had gotten to Series A within 12 months (fast)

  • Orange dot = percent of the cohort that had gotten to Series A within 24 months

Startups who raised seed in 2020 had really strong tailwinds from the macro environment to fly through early stage rounds.

Startups who raised seed in 2022 had no help from any tailwind.

More recently, seed startups have started to graduate to A at increased pace. I'd bet the 2025 cohorts look even better than the 2024 ones, which were already the best in 3 years.

Venture investors - how does your portfolio compare? LPs do enjoy hearing about strong markup rates, although some argue that you should also have a decently high loss ratio (which indicates you're taking enough wild bets to find the startup outliers).

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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