Seed Round 30 Percent Dilution Is Not Market Standard
Seed Round 30 Percent Dilution Is Not Market Standard
Author:
Peter Walker
Published date:
June 6, 2025
Less than 10% of primary software seed rounds in the last 6 months sold 30% or moreβCarta benchmark data gives founders the leverage to reject overreaching...
Founders - if investors are asking for 30% in your seed round, point them to this chart.
Less than 10% of software seed rounds in the last 6 months have sold 30% or more.
I thought reposting the chart below would be worthwhile as this was the number 1 question I got from founders at NY Tech Week.
Data covers 904 primary priced rounds raised by US startups on Carta. And that "primary" piece is important - this excludes a lot of little bridge / extension financings.
Here's what the market is today:
π£πΏπΆπ°π²π± π¦π²π²π±
Median is 20% sold in this round
Under 10% is more common than over 30%
π¦π²πΏπΆπ²π π
- 18% is median, slightly down from earlier in 2024
π¦π²πΏπΆπ²π π
- 15% median, but a pretty wide range under 25%
π¦π²πΏπΆπ²π π
Nearly half go for less than 10% sold
10.5% is the median across all rounds in this stage
Now, is this your only term sheet? Do you absolutely need the cash? There are valid reasons to sell 30% sometimes.
But "this is market" is not one of them π
Caveat: hard tech businesses like biotech, hardware, etc may see higher dilution per round.
Second Caveat: Sometimes rounds in non-core markets come with slightly higher dilution. But not always! Sometimes due to their relatively small size, rounds in not NYC or SF are actually less dilutive.
Share with a fundraising founder!
#startups #dilution #seed #founders
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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