How Long Does a Series A Take Now?

We analyzed five years of funding histories for 1,220 US venture-backed startups. Series A now happens faster than it used to, and fewer companies get there at all. Both are true.

The median 2020-22 seed company that raised a Series A did so in 17 months. Companies seeded in 2014-16 took 32 months for the same step. Deployment speed into companies that are working has nearly doubled. The share of seed companies that ever reach a Series A has dropped from its 2017-19 peak of 55.6% to 43.6% for the group that raised seeds in 2020-22.

Most commentary on the post-2022 funding market picks one of those two facts and runs with it. The data supports both.

01The Dataset

The dataset is 1,220 US-based venture-backed companies. Every company had at least one funding event on record. We pulled the full funding history for each one: every seed round, Series A, Series B, and beyond, including dates and dollar amounts where disclosed. That produced 3,403 funding events across the 1,220 companies.

Every number in this post comes from that table.

Dataset is US-only because the source list was. Findings apply to the US venture market specifically.

02Velocity by Seed Year

We wanted something sharper than a single market-wide median. The useful question is how long each group of seed-stage companies takes to reach Series A, grouped by the year they raised their seed. That lets us compare the companies that seeded during the ZIRP years against the ones that seeded during the correction.

The 10-month number for 2023-and-later seeds has a survivorship caveat. The only 2023-seeded companies who have raised a Series A by April 2026 are the ones who raised fast. Slower raisers from 2023 onward have not yet happened. The 2014-16 group is fully matured, and any Series A that was going to happen has happened. The two ends of the table are not comparable.

The 2020-22 group is mature enough to compare against the 2014-16 baseline. 17 months versus 32 months is close to a halving. Adjust for survivorship in the 2023 cohort and the trend still points one direction. Companies that raise a Series A are raising it faster than they used to.

03Progression Rates

Faster, for the companies that raise at all. The second axis is how many seed-stage companies ever reach Series A in the first place.

The peak is the 2017-19 group at 55.6%. Those companies seeded before the market got silly, then graduated into the 2020-22 capital flood. They got pulled up. Companies that raised a seed in 2020-22 landed mid-air. They raised at elevated prices and had to defend those valuations when the music stopped. Fifty-six percent of the 2020-22 seeds have not raised a Series A by April 2026, and the progression rate of 43.6% sits twelve points below the 2017-19 peak.

The 2023-and-later cohort is too early to judge fully. The 22.5% who have raised so far did it in a median of 10 months.

A decade ago, the median seed company raised an A and a tail of laggards stalled. Today, fewer raise an A, and the ones who do raise it in close to half the time. The market did not slow down. It got more selective, and the deployment into what it selected got faster.

04The Third Path

Path A and Path B cover the venture frame. The data contains a third bucket that gets written about less often and deserves its own panel.

We looked for companies that raised a seed, did not raise again for at least three years, cleared $3M in annual revenue, kept revenue per employee above $150K, stayed under $5M in total funding, and maintained at least ten employees. 86 companies matched the filter. That is 7.0% of the dataset.

Revenue per employee is the efficiency number to hold onto. The median efficient compounder sits at $446,762. The median Series A company in our dataset sits at $151,818. Series B at $144,750. The non-raisers run businesses close to three times as capital-efficient as their venture-funded peers, on a twentieth of the capital.

The share of companies taking this path has shrunk with each successive cohort of seed-stage founders.

The efficient path is narrower now because capital got more abundant during the 2020-22 window. When a Series A round is worth $15M at modest dilution and it closes in ten months, the cost of passing on that option goes up every year. The 2014-16 cohort faced a different tradeoff. Less capital was on offer, what was on offer closed slower, and running a business without more venture money was the reasonable move for a much larger share of the seed-stage population.

Three quarters of today's 86 efficient compounders were founded before 2015. Twenty one are modern, founded in 2015 or later, and fifteen of those sit in security or vertical SaaS categories where enterprise pricing and long sales cycles let capital efficiency compound. The old playbook is surviving in narrower territory.

05What Drove the Gap

Two forces combined to produce the split.

The bar for a Series A got real

Between 2015 and 2020, a credible Series A could happen on pattern matching: right market, right team, some early revenue, a plausible story. By 2023 that formula stopped working. Investors we spoke to described needing to see $1M to $2M of ARR on the low end and $3M to $5M on the high end before they would engage seriously. Among the 2020-22 seeds in our dataset, the companies that cleared that revenue bar raised fast. The ones who did not spent two years scrambling for bridge capital or stalled out.

Round sizes inflated, selectivity concentrated

The median Series A in our 2015-18 event window was $4.4M. By 2022-24 it was $15.0M. Series B went from $10.0M median to $36.0M. Seed rounds tripled from $0.75M to $3.7M. The inflation is not round-size growth in the normal sense. It is a smaller number of companies absorbing more capital per round.

The total capital flowing into Series A rounds is roughly flat or up slightly, but it is distributed across fewer, bigger rounds. The graduation funnel became a sieve with a smaller hole and a faster current. The shape of that sieve also changed by category, which we break down in why generalist SaaS stopped raising Series A.

06The Revenue Layer

Round size and progression rates explain how the capital flowed. Revenue explains what it bought.

We looked at the ratio of total funding raised to current annual revenue, grouped by the year each company raised its Series A. This is a rough funding-to-revenue multiple: how many dollars of capital each company has raised for every dollar of current annualized revenue.

The multiple climbs at every step. Companies that raised Series A in 2018-19 sit at 4.6x. The 2024-25 cohort is at 7.0x. Older companies have had more time to grow into their capital stacks, so some of the lift is maturation. Even accounting for that, newer Series A raisers are more richly funded relative to the revenue they currently produce.

The revenue numbers are estimates, not filed financials. They are useful for relative comparison across groups. We would not trust them for absolute accuracy at any individual company. The trend direction is robust, and the cohort ordering does not change if we use mean instead of median.

The 7.0x multiple for 2024-25 Series A is the number worth sitting with. Half the companies that raised a Series A in the last eighteen months have raised seven dollars of capital for every dollar of current annualized revenue. Series A investors typically need a Series B marked at two to three times the post-money they invested at. Delivering that from a 7x capital base requires the revenue to catch up substantially before the next round. Some of those companies will. Some will not, and the ones who do not will spend 2027 running bridge rounds or cutting hard.

07Implications for Founders and Operators

08Methodology