Series A

“A billion dollars could just be the new Series A. If you think about it, we used to do a fifty million dollar post at Series A, hoping it would become a billion. Now you do a billion and it becomes a twenty billion dollar company.”

“I think a billion dollar valuation is the new series, eh? And you're like, whoa, Harry, whoa, whoa, kiddo, calm down, listen to the facts. We used to do a fifty million post and hope it would become a 1,000,000,020 x, without dilution, blunt. Now, you enter at…”

“The median series A these days is 15.”

“I think Series A is the worst place to be today, and my partners always hate me for this, because all Series A founders are like, great, we won't go and see them but it's the worst place to be. You have, like, one to three million in revenue, and you're at 200…”

“Is I'm seeing Series A is priced at three to 500 on two to five million in revenue, but I'm finding the B at a hundred million in revenue priced at one to 1.5. It's a three X price increase for a 50 X revenue increase.”

“That's the conventional wisdom, right, is, You get to a million ARR, you raise a series A, whatever the amount is, you hire a sales leader, you hire, spend money in marketing, and growth will come. But, you know, it doesn't because you have to do a lot of work…”

“And there's about a hundred million cows in the US. If you're doing well, you could charge 15 to 20 dollars per test. So even if you assume you could test every cow every year, you'd be at 1.5 billion, like total market, which is not enough to do a series A of…”

“You can't do Series A unless you have a four hundred million dollar fund today. Absolutely no chance.”

“They were finishing the year at one and a half million ARR, finishing next year at five million ARR. Today, brutal as it is, this isn't good enough to raise a good Series A.”

“The deals that are getting swept off are going one and a half to 15, right?”

“You know, at the time, the biggest semiconductor fundraiser for a Series A was around, like, 40, fifty million dollars.”

“So for the series B, that was all inbound, but the series A, we actually did run a process because we were like, we should raise money here.”

“At the time when we raised the Series A, the team was five people, including myself, and Mac's age was 24, right?”

“If you come out for the A and if anyone is listening, if you come out for the A and you say like low teens or like not even below a 10, it doesn't seem like you're ambitious and it just doesn't make sense to like VC math.”

“But in aggregate, I think series A is the place that I would be most cautious about investing right now because the money is really high and these are still very young, very, very unproven businesses.”

“Getting to a billion dollars, you're investing in this kind of Series A, it doesn't even come close to returning the fund. You know, unicorns are not the vibe anymore. It's Decacorns Plus.”

“Like, you know, the median Series A in the Bay right now is eighty-five million, post-money. The median in Austin is probably more like 65. The median in D.C., probably more like 60, and on down the line.”

“You've got the companies that raised about a year ago. So Q one of 20, 25 or so, how many of them have gotten to series A so far? It's something like 10 to 11%, which in a year is actually pretty good. It's much better than it was in 20, 22 or 23, where it was…”

“Yeah, median C would have been more like six or seven. Median A would have been more like 25.”

“I think Series A is the worst place to be in the market. Little PMS, like one to three million of revenue. But the price is 200 X ARR.”

“Sometimes the best place to be could actually be investing a billion or things like that. Where it's de-risked. You can model the cash flows.”

“We just announced our Twenty million dollar series a at the turn of the year. And with that also announced three hundred million phone calls automated to date, which is just, you know, when you start from nothing and you start at the beginning, three hundred m…”

“My takeaway is, honestly, you can't do early, and you're going to kill me, Rory, with less than a billion if you're going to compete to lead A's.”

“For that kind of Series A game, the Series A is not, for us, especially for a firm that just has, you know, checks for A's and B's and of this size, it's not an option value on putting a ton of money in later. Most of your value is made on that first check.”

“Towards the end of 24. And then we did it in two tranches. So the first tranche was like thirty million more for just purely supporting the organic growth.”

“When we got to our Series A, we had actually only spent, like, Or 350 K.”

“They've basically gone and they deploy fifteen million dollar checks almost as an option and a lead lead generation for the next run. And the strategy is obviously to have an index at the A of every single good A company and then double down on the ones that t…”

“If you're just constantly stepping to the plate and trying to, you know, I can see at the series A that this is going to be a hundred billion dollar exit, you will just overswing and you will fail.”

“Not at the Series A, to be frank. I think, Both my founder and I are very much focused on the business right now. Don't have the need to take some money off the table at this point. And so it wasn't part of what we optimize for as founders.”

“We are most excited about the truly early stage in the seed in NA, and as our size is relatively modest, at a 1,000,000,006, we can actually get access that's meaningful, and some of these smaller funds that can move the needle for us.”

“And I say that Series A is the hardest place to be investing right now. Because essentially you have a million in revenue, very little signs of product market fit, honestly, at a million in revenue. You're paying a hundred to 200 XAR and it's incredibly compet…”

“That was probably worse timing because it was at the end of, it was December of 20, 21. So it was literally right as we were falling off the cliff, right before we fell off the cliff. And so we got an amazing valuation at that. And then the few years after it …”

“I want to say that it was in the I mean, more than 15 X. More than 15 X.”

“I look at Series A today, dude, and I think it's the worst place to be investing, and so I'd love your thoughts on this. You know, we have 200 XAROs, 150 XAROs, there's very little company progression from the seed round, but there's a very steep price increas…”

“You couldn't do the Series A of OpenAI and do the Series A of Anthropic. That would be stupid. I would assume one of the CEOs would stop you.”

“Insofar as we can tell, if you take that core B to B software company, you know, used to be, you have a million bucks in ARR. You can start talking about a series A. Now it's three on median and the top end is more like seven or eight.”

“The worst place to be investing is Series A. You either need to be pre-seed or pre-IPO today. To make money.”

“And, you know, at the A, it's 40, 50% of total deals. The interesting, it climbs steadily, and by the C, it's about 80%. In other words, they, let's call it the Rory hard to beat mental list. By the time you get to the C, 80% of the time, one of, they have one…”

“Series A is the worst place to be investing. Company progression is minimal. Price is four to five X, the seed price. And we're paying a 150 to 200 X ARR with little signs of product market fit.”

“I just did a Series A where the company had, like, ten million dollars of ARR when I invested in it.”

“Yeah, like, post-series A, it actually largely feels, like, the playbook is the same, and the companies might be smaller for the same amount of revenue, but it Feels it's entirely because they hit the revenue so fast and there's still just bottlenecked on how …”

“What it showed is that on a percentage of graduation basis, yes, the highest valued companies graduate to Series A little bit more often than the other companies. But it's not a massive difference. It's within a couple percentage points.”

“The companies that didn't had a big, big change were the lowest valued companies. So the lowest quartile, if you were raising a seed round and it's in the zero to call it 25th percentile of valuation, so on the very low end, those companies made it to series A…”

“Series A, 20, 21, you had 25 people working for the company, full-time equity holding employees working for the company. Now you probably have 17. 16.”

“Now, it's down to 17, and I think by the end of the year, that'll be more like 15. And that's at, you know, on the day of the Series A fundraise.”

“Right now on Carta, the median time between A and B is close to a thousand days. It's a long time. 2.7 years or so.”

“The last stuff that I saw from Silicon Valley Bank had median ARR at A is just under three million.”

“I'm clearly gonna Lose the deals that I want to lose, and if I win them, it's probably not the ones that I want.”

“By the way, we were profitable before raising series A”

“So we raised what turned out to be eventually forty seven million dollars in our series A.”

“Carta has some, like, incredible data on this that 41% of companies seen in Serie A, Series A are all AI, quote, unquote, AI companies.”

“And we tried to explain this to people because it was so new, like no one got it. Everyone thought, An inference platform is an inference platform. Doesn't matter what kind of model it is. There are other people who are more qualified or more prepared to do th…”

“The single strongest correlation of how a company will perform is which, how high status a VC does a series A is within the stack ranking of VCs. It is far more predictive, sadly, than, you know, my own selection or any other variable I can find. It's almost d…”

“We typically focus on series A rounds. That's kind of our sweet spot. So about 75% of our first checks Go into A rounds and about 25% of our checks go into seed rounds.”

“The race took, like, somewhere close to, like, two to three weeks.”

“We've raised a 22 and a half million dollar Series A.”

“It is taking from series A to series B, for instance, it's the median amount of time is over two and a half years and the highest higher end, you know, the 75th percentile is well over three years.”

“If I had shown that for the last call it four years, five years, seed and a don't move. They're always right around. A little bit higher, a little bit lower, but like they just sit on that line.”

“So it used to be in 20, 21, that the median amount of CAT or median amount of ARR for a Series A company is like just above one million bucks. In 20, 24, that was nearly three million dollars. And on the top quartile, so 75th percentile ARR used to be in 21, a…”

“So if you used to have, say, 20 people, 22 people at your Series A company when you raised that round, that was two or three years ago. At the end of 2024, we had it at 15 people per Series A company that raised it in 2025. The number is now like 13. So that's…”