Raising Series A Is Still Immensely Difficult in 2025
Raising Series A Is Still Immensely Difficult in 2025
Author:
Peter Walker
Published date:
September 9, 2025
Seed cohorts from 2024 are graduating to Series A slightly faster than 2023—but time is almost out for 2021 and 2022 cohorts that still haven't raised their...
Founders — ignore the AI headlines, raising your Series A these days will be immensely difficult.
But there may be a little fundraising light at the end of the tunnel.
Startups that raised their seed rounds in 2024 are graduating to Series A a bit faster than their counterparts did in 2023. The trend is positive.
But time has almost run out for those that raised their seeds in 2021 and 2022.
Chart Explainer
- Each row is a group of companies that raised their seed round in that quarter.
- Each column shows the time elapsed since that seed round.
- Percentages reflect the share of seed companies from that cohort that raised a Series A in that timeframe.
For example: of the startups that raised their seed round in Q1 2021, 32.9% had gone on to raise a Series A in 2 years (Q8 in the columns)
It's easy to see the march of the deep cobalt cells in the first graphic, which denote less than 25% of startups making the jump. Things got "too" easy in 2020 and are now much harder.
In the more detailed color version, the reduction of green and gold cells along with the steady march of red and pink into Year 2 and Year 3 make it clear that the boom times of venture fundraising are behind us.
But for the first time in a long time, graduation rates are picking up.
9% of startups that raised their seed in Q2 2024 have gotten to A so far (in just one year). Now 9% doesn't sound like a lot, but it's the highest such rate since Q3 2021!
Optimism 😇
Now for the gloomy side. So many startups raised frothy rounds in 2021 and early 2022. If they have yet to get to A, the likelihood of them ever doing so is diminishing by the day.
We celebrate resilience in founders. But when does scrappy persistence become stubborn refusal to accept reality?
No easy answers, but the data is pretty clear.
Happy to provide either version of the graphic as a standalone chart, shout it out in the comments.
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.