Most Seed Startups Never Reach Series A Data Shows

Ignore the headlines - getting from Seed to Series A is a massive uphill battle.

Easy to get caught up in the stories about small teams raising millions and then dancing into a Series A within 6 months.

And sure, it does happen.

But for most (the vast majority!), this is not real life.

Data below covers 12,249 seed rounds raised from Q1 2018 thru Q3 2025. The initial date column relates to when the seed round was raised and then we simply track the percentage that made it to Series A over time.

For example: within the Q4 2019 cohort of seed rounds, 32.6% had made it to Series A after 2 years.

30% after 2 years is a high percentage. So high, in fact, that we haven't seen it in a long time.

𝗡𝗼 𝗰𝗼𝗵𝗼𝗿𝘁 𝗵𝗮𝘀 𝘀𝗲𝗲𝗻 𝗮 𝟯𝟬% 𝗴𝗿𝗮𝗱𝘂𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝗼𝗿 𝗵𝗶𝗴𝗵𝗲𝗿 𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗤𝟯 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟭.

Three things to consider:

• Yes, some of these seed cohorts are quite young. The grad rate will definitely continue to rise for the 2024 and 2025 seeds, perhaps at a much faster clip than the prior years.

• It's possible (although I kinda doubt it) that there are so many companies trying to seed-strap and take no more capital in after the seed round it's throwing off these numbers. Maybe!

• History rhymes rather than repeats. In the 2021 bubble, it felt like everyone was flying through the venture stages. Today it feels as though a select few are flying (with bigger $ than ever) while the messy middle is capturing most.

You could reasonably say that it was too easy to get the next round of funding in 2020/21 and that the current market, while more difficult, is more...realistic. That's a valid take.

But you could also say that this sort of concentration into "winners" early on is slightly corrosive to the overall venture capital goal of funding innovation that matters.

Tricky times.