The Road to Series A

Over the past few quarters, we have been digesting commentary, or, in case of founders, dealing with the uphill task of fund-raising and wallowing in a ton of advice from various sources on how to deal with the situation.

I believe we are essentially at a place which is the old normal, hyphenated with an exuberant period between 2014 and the first half of 2015. Using Venture Intelligence data for the vintage years 2012 through 2015, I looked at the financing steps needed for a company to get to Series  A. 

For those of us in the market at the time, one may recall that 2012 was quite a tough year for venture financing. Then we had the “bull-run” of 2014 and part of 2015. So what was it like to raise Series A financing if you got seeded in 2012. On average, it took you two years and 1.4x rounds of seed funding to get to Ser A (defined as a round >$2M).  In 2013, the time taken to get to Ser A fell to about 1.5 years with a similar number of average rounds to Ser A as in 2012. Things of course, turned a lot better for the 2014 and 15 vintages, where it took much less than 12 months to get to Ser A from seed and correspondingly the vast majority of companies that got to Series A did it with just one seed round injection.

The quantum of funding needed to get to Ser A, while somewhat variable, was not nearly as volatile as the time to get to the milestone. The range for this number is $650K to $1.03M.

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