December 15 Is the Best Single Week to Sign a VC Round

Author:

Peter Walker

Published date:

November 9, 2025

Over 5% of all primary VC rounds are signed in the week of December 15th—the highest of any single week of the year across 2016-2024 Carta data.

There is actually a "best week" in VC-backed startups.

It's the week of December 15th.

Over 5% of primary venture rounds are signed in that week, significantly higher than any other single week of the year.

Data here is from US startups that use Carta and are raising priced rounds. It's a combined view for all deals raised 2016–2024. We exclude bridge/extension financings.

𝗙𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗿𝗮𝗶𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗧𝗶𝗺𝗲𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗲 𝗦𝘁𝘂𝗳𝗳

• Week 51 (starting ~Dec 15th) is always the biggest week for signed deals. Probably a combination of wanting to get in-process deals over the line before the holidays hit + culmination of the fall fundraising season.
• Weeks 14 and 18 are almost always big weeks as well in late March and late April respectively.
• There are basically no deals signed the last week or the first week of each year.
• There's a bit of noise in some summers (and macro conditions matter, very few deals in Q2 2020 for instance) but in general deals get done every week, every year.

Big note - this data is based on when the deals are actually 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗹𝗲𝘁𝗲𝗱.

I would not advise starting a fundraise on Dec 15th. You'll probably get swamped in the holiday break and have to restart in January anyway.

Good luck in this final month or so of 2025 fundraising 🙏

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.