# VC-Backed Founders Are Signing Up for a Decade or More

**Author:** Peter Walker  
**Read time:** 2 minutes  
**Published date:** July 22, 2025

Time from incorporation to Series A, B, and C has drifted upward consistently—10-year fund lifecycles are now slightly delusional for seed-stage investors.

VC-backed founders — it's going to take a decade. Probably more.

Seed-stage VCs — planning to complete your full fund lifecycle in 10 years is optimistic to slightly delusional at this point.

Here's some data on the time (in years) from the day of incorporation to various funding milestones for startups.

Yes, I know funding milestones aren't everything. But if you're on the venture path then they matter - and speed is a major aspect of the VC growth model.

Chart below shows time to primary round (no funny business with bridges or extensions).

## Median age of company by funding stage in 2025
- Seed: 1.3 years old
- Series A: 2.8 years
- Series B: 4.7 years
- Series C: 6.2 years
- Series D: 8.3 years

And of course that's just to Series D - many companies will raise additional rounds or take years to go from D to IPO.

A couple things stand out here. First, obviously, startups are staying private longer and the biggest private companies are beginning to rival their public counterparts in size and influence. No one could have imagined we'd have multiple $300B+ private companies a decade ago, yet here we are.

Second, note the slight downtick in median age from 2024 to 2025. I think that's mostly an effect of AI startups speed-racing through funding stages but would need to dig deeper. Blip, not a trend in my view.

Third, and this one is for investors, this means *your eventual winners need to be much bigger*. A company that exits for $1 billion after 15 years is less valuable to your fund IRR than one that used to exit for the same valuation after 10 years.

Startups are a marathon and a sprint. Respect to the founders willing to take this plunge 🙏

#startups #founders #VC #privatemarkets

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