Planning to Raise VC Every 18 Months Is Planning to Fail

Author:

Peter Walker

Read time:

1 minute

Published date:

November 12, 2025

Median time between rounds now exceeds 2 years at Seed to A, A to B, and B to C—the old 18-24 month advice is dangerously out of date for today's founders.

"Oh, no worries, we'll raise every 18 months or so" ...good luck!

VC world has changed. The old advice was to raise a venture round every 18-24 months (green zone in the below chart).

That is 𝗰𝗹𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗹𝘆 out of date.

Median time between rounds (the circles in each range) is now above 2 years for Seed -> A, A -> B, and B -> C.

And on the upper end of the scale, founders are having to make do for a lot longer than planned. The 75th percentile for time between rounds is now above 3.5 years for all these stages.

But what about all those headlines of AI-native companies raising every 6 months for wildly increasing valuations?

Sure, they exist. But they make up a tiny fraction of all VC-backed companies. I wouldn't make those outliers the base case for your planning.

Big caveat here — I'm sure in 𝘀𝗼𝗺𝗲 of these cases, the time between rounds is extending because the companies in question don't need to raise. They've got their burn under control, they're growing faster than planned, whatever the reason.

But there's also a lot of the other end. Companies cutting spending they'd rather keep. Companies not hiring to save cash. Companies turning to investors for bridge rounds and extensions.

You'd rather not be in the latter category, all things considered.

So - how long can you make the money you raise tomorrow last?

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.