# Repeat Founders Now Get Majority of Early-Stage Capital

Author:  
Peter Walker  
Published date:  
September 17, 2025

More than 50% of Seed and Series A capital in 2025 went to founders who had previously led a VC-backed company—a growing structural disadvantage for...

Proof: VCs prefer a repeat founder.

Data from the past 6.5 years shows that VCs today increasingly favor founders who have previously founded a VC-backed company.

More than 50% of Seed + Series A capital (the first institutional checks, really) went to these repeat founders so far in 2025.

(and of course there are lot more founders that have never been VC funded than those that have such a startup on their resumes).

On a deal basis, this preference is less extreme, with repeat founders taking 40% or so of total round volume.

So - repeat founders get funded more often (on a percentage basis) and their rounds tend to be bigger.

Pattern matching is real!

I'm not sure this means VCs are systemically making bad bets, I can see the logic of backing repeat founders more often pretty easily.

But I hope first time founders don't get left behind.

Author: [Peter Walker](/content/author/peter-walker/index.html)

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.