Seed Round Sizes Differ by Location But Medians Are Consistent

Author: Peter Walker
Published date: June 4, 2025

For the critics: yes, valuations and round sizes vary by city. But national medians still describe the market accurately because outlier Bay Area deals...

This is for the haters (and by haters, I mean lovely VCs who invest in startups outside of SF and NYC).

Yes. You are all correct.

Valuations and round sizes are different depending on the location of the startup across the US. Bay Area metrics are not Charlotte metrics (or heck, even Seattle or Austin metrics).

And yes, if you look at medians for the entire country, those are heavily influenced by coastal valuations...because they should be! There are a lot more rounds completed in the mature ecosystems than there are in the South or Midwest. Weighting the national figures towards Silicon Valley happens by default.

But I digress. Here's the data over the last 9 months or so for the 4 census regions across Seed, Series A, and Series B:

Seed

• Median post-money valuations
  West: $20.8M, Northeast: $20M, South: $14M, Midwest: $10.3M
• Median cash raised:
  West: $4M, Northeast: $3.7M, South: $2.8M, Midwest: $2M

Series A

• Median post-money valuations
  West: $64.7M, Northeast: $59.1M, South: $50M, Midwest: $47.2M
• Median cash raised:
  West: $12.9M, Northeast: $10.9M, South: $8.4M, Midwest: $7.1M

Series B

• Median post-money valuations
  West: $143.8M, Northeast: $141M, South: $133M, Midwest: $70M
• Median cash raised:
  West: $21.6M, Northeast: $20.0M, South: $13.4M, Midwest: $13.6M

The more you know :)

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.