Startup funding stages explained: pre-seed, seed, Series A and beyond.

• Pre-seed funding: the first outside money in a company, often before there is a product or revenue. The SEC says friends and family tend to invest at this stage or at seed.
• Seed funding: money to take a product toward the market and find the customers who will pay for it.
• Series A: typically the first large venture round, to turn early traction into a repeatable business.
• Series B and later: money to grow what already works, with later rounds lettered C, D and onward.

Early rounds are often raised on instruments that convert later, such as a SAFE or a convertible note, which the SEC says is often used in seed rounds.

PitchBook, whose data the NVCA publishes in its yearbook, sorts US venture deals into four stage categories. In 2025, the median deal and the money invested grew at every step:

The same data, by series, shows how far valuations and company ages move from round to round:

A median is the middle of the range, not a target: half of the deals were larger and half smaller, and sector, region and timing move the numbers a great deal. Source: the NVCA 2026 Yearbook public data pack, pages 10, 11 and 22.

Stage names track the market, and the market moves. In the same PitchBook data, the median pre-money valuation at Series A rose from $6.0 million in 2004 to $49.0 million in 2025, and the median company raising a Series A was 4.6 years old in 2025, against 2.1 years in 2004. A Series A today asks more of a company than it did twenty years ago.

Investors also draw the line between pre-seed funding and seed in different places. That is why the question to ask any investor is not “do you do seed?” but how much they invest, on what instrument, and what they expect the money to achieve.

• Find investors who say they invest at your stage. Our directory of pre-seed and seed investors and the stage filters in our investor directories start the list; the firm's own site confirms it.
• Show what the round is for. The SEC lists how much you are raising and how the money will be spent among the first things to prepare before raising.
• Know the instrument. A SAFE, a convertible note and preferred stock carry different terms, and a qualified securities lawyer should review them before you sign.
• Plan the next milestone. Each round should get the company to the evidence the next investors will need to see.

For many companies, seed money pays for finding the first customers. Our guide to building a marketing strategy from scratch covers that work, and our page on marketing for technology companies explains how we help.