How Much of Your Company Are Investors Asking For in 2023

Founders: here's how much of your company investors are asking for.

Data from 1,229 primary rounds raised on Carta in 2023 so far - US only, priced equity only, apologies in advance to the international audience!

First column in the chart shows the median percentage dilution for each venture round. So a typical Seed round has the founders giving up 20.5% of the company to their seed investors.

But medians in regards to dilution obscure some wide distributions.

So I broke out the rounds into tiers of dilution, each tier representing 5%. You can see that within the Seed round row, 26% of Seed rounds gave up between 20% and 24.9% equity.

Some key takeaways:

• Series A and Series B seem to have the widest distribution - rounds raised in this two stages are all over the place in terms of dilution.

• Seed rounds cluster around 20% - but you'll also need to consider the dilution from any SAFE or convertible notes raised previously (which is not visualized below).

• These bubbles refer to primary rounds only (so your initial Series A, for instance). If you go back to current investors and raise a bridge round, the dilution will be substantially different.

Obviously, each round is a unique negotiation between the founders and investors. Founders want to hold on to a significant stake in the company they've created - and investors need a certain allocation in order to for their fund economics make sense.

Always a tricky conversation, but hopefully these benchmarks help set the terms!

Don't miss our full report on all startup data from Q2 coming out at the end of the month - sign up at the URL in graphic.

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