How Every Sector Stacked Up in Series A Funding 2025

Author:

Peter Walker

Published date:

May 29, 2025

From 1,095 Series A rounds: AI application, semiconductor, and defense sectors led on both valuation and round size while traditional SaaS clustered around...

How did your sector stack up for Series A funding over the past year?

Data below is from 1,095 Series A rounds raised by US startups on Carta over that last 12 months.

We excluded all the messy bridges and extensions, just primary rounds.

X-Axis = the median round size for the sector
Y-Axis = the median pre-money valuation of rounds in the sector
Bubble Size = total number of rounds

Note on the AI bubble

AI is involved in every single one of these sectors, but folks talk about it as its own thing so we also split it out. The orange-yellow AI bubble is representative of the median valuation / round size if you treated AI software companies as a separate industry. The size is not quite right (there are more AI companies than that)

The Animated Highlights

Health is a big sector but widely varied. Investors were fairly bullish on Biotech and Healthtech but Medical Devices lagged behind.
Deep Tech (which includes Hardware, Biotech, Renewables, Semiconductors, Logistics, and more) was a growing theme at Series A. Capital for physical things is on the rise.
Certain sectors like Personal Products, Media, Food, and Med Devices are raising much smaller rounds at the A than other industries. Could be a good thing (capital efficiency) or a negative one (lack of interest).

The bubbles at this stage have more widely varied implied dilution. 20% is still the median for most of these rounds but deals are getting done with 10% dilution and 30% dilution. Demand matters!

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#startups #fundraising #founders #SeriesA

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.