How Money Raised Translates to Valuation at Each Stage

How Money Raised Translates to Valuation at Each Stage

Author

Peter Walker

|

Read time: 

1 minute

Published date: 

December 12, 2025

A reference table showing how cash raised at each stage maps to expected valuation ranges from seed through Series C—based on 2025 Carta round data.

LinkedIn: How Money Raised Translates to Valuation at Each Stage

A table to help founders visualize how the money they raise translates into company valuation for Seed rounds through Series C.

𝗛𝗼𝘄 𝘁𝗼 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗴𝗿𝗮𝗽𝗵𝗶𝗰

  • Stage names cover a range of round sizes. The labels should encompass about 90% of the rounds in that stage for 2025.

  • Dollars raised is the key column. You go from the amount of cash to the ranges for valuation. Oftentimes startups can be valued very differently even though they are raising the same $.

  • Example:

Seed companies often raise about $4M. The median valuation for companies raising between $1M and $5M is 16 million post-money.

This table tells me two things

1) Round names are just slightly useful

2) Valuations and cash raised are correlated but hardly 1:1

It also tells me people are doing some WILD deals in 2025, but we all kinda knew that 😁

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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