Startup Funding Statistics by Stage 2026
By Axis Intelligence Research
Co-author: Mia Scarlett | Last updated: August 9, 2026 | License: CC BY 4.0
Global venture funding reached a record $510 billion in the first half of 2026, but the money did not spread evenly across the funding ladder. Late-stage and technology growth rounds took $134 billion in the second quarter alone. Seed and angel rounds took $12 billion. According to Axis Intelligence Research, that is 11.2 dollars of late-stage capital for every dollar of seed capital.
Quick Answer
Startup funding by stage in 2026 is defined by one number: the Capital Stage Gradient (CSG™), an Axis Intelligence Research metric measuring how many dollars of late-stage and technology growth capital the market deploys for every dollar of seed and angel capital in the same quarter. The global CSG reading for Q2 2026 is 11.2, up from 5.3 in Q2 2025 — the gradient doubled in twelve months. In North America the reading is 20.6. Seed’s share of global venture dollars fell from 11.3% to 5.9% year over year even as seed dollars themselves rose, because the denominator grew faster than the numerator. According to Axis Intelligence Research, the funding ladder has not lengthened; the bottom rung has thinned relative to everything above it.
Key Findings
- According to Axis Intelligence Research, the global Capital Stage Gradient reached 11.2 in Q2 2026, meaning $11.20 of late-stage and technology growth capital entered the market for every $1.00 of seed and angel capital — up 109.1% from a reading of 5.3 in Q2 2025.
- Global late-stage and technology growth funding totalled $134 billion in Q2 2026, versus $55 billion in Q2 2025, per Crunchbase quarterly data published July 2, 2026.
- Seed and angel funding globally reached $12 billion in Q2 2026, a 16.5% year-over-year rise in dollars but a fall from 11.3% to 5.9% of all venture capital, per Axis Intelligence Research calculations on Crunchbase stage totals.
- Only 16% of U.S. companies that raised a $1 million-plus seed round in 2024 have progressed to a later stage or exited, against 55% or higher for cohorts through 2020, per Crunchbase seed cohort data published May 26, 2026.
- According to Axis Intelligence Research, at the 2025 median U.S. seed round of $3.0 million, the 2024 cohort’s graduation rate implies $18.75 million of seed capital deployed per company that reaches the next stage, against $5.45 million on the pre-2021 benchmark rate.
How Much Startup Funding Went to Each Stage in 2026?
The stage split is the whole story, and it is easiest to read as three numbers in a single quarter from a single dataset.
Crunchbase recorded $205 billion of global venture funding in Q2 2026 across more than 5,000 companies, following $305 billion in Q1 — an H1 total of $510 billion that exceeded the $440 billion invested in the whole of 2025. Late-stage and technology growth accounted for $134 billion. Seed and angel accounted for $12 billion.
Global venture funding by stage, Q2 2026 vs Q2 2025
| Stage | Q2 2025 | Q2 2026 | Change | Share of quarter, 2025 | Share of quarter, 2026 | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Seed and angel | $10.3B | $12.0B | +16.5% | 11.3% | 5.9% | Crunchbase; shares calculated by Axis Intelligence Research |
| Early stage (Series A–B) | $26.0B | $59.0B | +126.9% | 28.6% | 28.8% | Crunchbase Q2 2025; Q2 2026 figure derived by Axis Intelligence Research (see below) |
| Late stage and technology growth | $55.0B | $134.0B | +143.6% | 60.4% | 65.4% | Crunchbase |
| All stages | $91.0B | $205.0B | +125.3% | 100% | 100% | Crunchbase |
Look at the early-stage row. Its share of the quarter barely moved — 28.6% to 28.8%. Every point of share that late stage gained came out of seed. That is a specific finding, and it contradicts the loose version of this story that treats “early stage” and “seed” as interchangeable. They are not, and in 2026 they are moving in opposite directions.
The early-stage figure: a documented source discrepancy
Crunchbase’s Q2 2026 global report prints early-stage funding as $589 billion for a quarter whose stated total is $205 billion. The figure cannot be right as printed.
Axis Intelligence Research does not silently correct other people’s numbers, so here is the reconstruction, with the arithmetic exposed:
Early stage (residual) = total − late stage − seed $205B − $134B − $12B = $59B
Two independent checks support $59 billion as the intended figure. First, the digit sequence 589 is one insertion away from 59. Second, Crunchbase describes early-stage funding as up “more than 100%” year over year; $59 billion against Q2 2025’s $26 billion is +126.9%, while $589 billion would be +2,165%, a figure no report would characterise that mildly. Axis Intelligence Research publishes $59 billion as a calculated residual, flags it as such in the dataset, and retains the published $589 billion as a disputed row so the discrepancy stays traceable.
A second, smaller inconsistency sits in the same report. Crunchbase states late-stage funding was up 141% year over year. Against the $55 billion it published for Q2 2025, $134 billion is +143.6%. Back-solving the stated 141% returns a Q2 2025 base of $55.6 billion — consistent with a routine upward restatement of a prior quarter as late deals are added. Both figures appear in the dataset with their as-of dates.
Mia Scarlett: Two errors in one report is not a reason to stop using Crunchbase. It is a reason to publish reconstructions instead of quoting the headline. Every stage number in a venture report is a snapshot of a database that is still filling in, and the earliest stages fill in slowest — Crunchbase says so itself in its methodology note. Anyone quoting a seed total from the week a quarter closes is quoting a floor, not a level. The residual method used above works precisely because the total and the late-stage figure settle first.
Source: Axis Intelligence Research — CC BY 4.0
What Is the Capital Stage Gradient (CSG™)?
Compilation is not analysis. The Axis layer on this page is a metric built to answer the question the stage tables imply but never state: how top-heavy is the venture market right now?
Capital Stage Gradient (CSG™) — the number of dollars of late-stage and technology growth capital deployed for every dollar of seed and angel capital, in the same quarter, from the same dataset, for the same geography.
Formula and inputs
CSG = (late-stage capital + technology growth capital) ÷ (seed capital + angel capital)
Both terms use Crunchbase’s published stage definitions without adjustment: seed and angel covers seed, pre-seed and angel rounds plus certain rounds at or below $3 million; late stage covers Series C and later plus certain rounds above $15 million; technology growth is a private equity round raised by a company that previously raised venture. The Crunchbase methodology page is the reference definition. No weighting, no normalisation, no seasonal adjustment — a single division whose inputs any reader can verify in the linked quarterly reports.
Higher readings mean capital is pooling above the entry point. Lower readings mean the ladder is being fed from the bottom.
CSG readings
| Reading | Geography | Period | CSG | Inputs |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Baseline | Global | Q2 2025 | 5.3 | $55.0B ÷ $10.3B |
| Current | Global | Q2 2026 | 11.2 | $134.0B ÷ $12.0B |
| Current | North America | Q2 2026 | 20.6 | $101.0B ÷ $4.9B |
Source: Crunchbase quarterly stage totals; ratio computed by Axis Intelligence Research. All readings as of August 9, 2026.
The global gradient rose 109.1% in a year. The North American reading of 20.6 is nearly double the global one, and the reason is not that North America starves its seed market in absolute terms — it is that North America hosts the megarounds. Anthropic’s $65 billion alone equals 31.7% of the entire global quarter.
A companion ratio makes the same point without the megaround distortion. Early-stage capital per dollar of seed capital was 2.5 in Q2 2025 and 4.9 in Q2 2026. Even excluding the late-stage tier entirely, Series A and B are pulling away from seed at roughly twice the previous rate.
What the reading does not capture
The CSG is a dollar ratio, not a company ratio. It says nothing about how many startups raised at each stage, and a quarter in which one company raises $65 billion will move the reading more than a quarter in which four hundred companies each raise $150 million. It is also computed on a commercial dataset whose earliest-stage coverage fills in over the weeks after a quarter closes, so a fresh reading is a ceiling that will edge down as seed deals are added. Readings are therefore published with an as-of date and revised, not overwritten, when the underlying quarter is restated.
Seed Funding Statistics 2026: Round Sizes, Distribution and Graduation Rates
Seed is where the market’s bifurcation is most visible, because the word now covers two incompatible things.
Median seed round size and quartiles
| Metric | Value | Period | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Median U.S. seed round | $3.0M | 2025 | Crunchbase |
| Upper quartile seed round | $5.6M | 2025 | Crunchbase |
| Lower quartile seed round | $1.0M | 2025 | Crunchbase |
| Median U.S. Series A round | $15.0M | 2025 | Crunchbase |
| Upper quartile Series A round | $25.0M | 2025 | Crunchbase |
| Lower quartile Series A round | $7.0M | 2025 | Crunchbase |
The median U.S. seed round is roughly three times its 2018 level. Uncork Capital’s managing partner told Crunchbase his firm’s average seed check has grown from $2.5 million or less to $4.5 million in eighteen months, while still targeting at least 10% ownership — the ownership target is the constraint that drags check sizes up as valuations climb.
How global seed dollars are distributed
Of the $12 billion of global seed and angel capital in Q2 2026, Crunchbase reports $2.8 billion went to seed rounds of $100 million or more, and $5 billion to rounds of $10 million or less. According to Axis Intelligence Research, that leaves $4.2 billion — 35% of the stage — in the $10 million to $100 million band, and puts 23.3% of all global seed capital into rounds large enough that the label “seed” is doing no descriptive work at all.
Sector-level seed patterns for one vertical are broken out in our fintech funding statistics. In North America, at least five companies raised seed or angel rounds of $100 million or more in the quarter, the largest a $200 million round for foundational AI startup Mirendil.
Seed graduation rates by cohort
This is the number that should govern how founders size a seed round, and it has moved further than any valuation figure.
| Seed cohort ($1M+ initial round) | Share progressing to a later stage or exit | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Cohorts through 2020 | 55% or higher | Crunchbase |
| 2023 | 24% | Crunchbase |
| 2024 | 16% | Crunchbase |
Company counts and formation-side context for the same cohorts sit in our startup statistics dataset. Crunchbase also reports the median interval from seed to Series A has stretched past two years since 2023, continuing a trend that runs from 2018 with a brief compression in the 2021–2022 peak.
Hold the round size constant and the graduation collapse becomes a capital-efficiency statement, and it connects directly to the mortality data in our startup failure rate statistics. According to Axis Intelligence Research:
Seed capital per graduating company = median seed round ÷ graduation rate Cohorts through 2020: $3.0M ÷ 0.55 = $5.45M 2023 cohort: $3.0M ÷ 0.24 = $12.50M 2024 cohort: $3.0M ÷ 0.16 = $18.75M
The calculation deliberately fixes the round size at the 2025 median so that the change reflects graduation rates alone rather than a mix of round inflation and funnel narrowing. Read it as a portfolio-construction number, not a company-level one: the seed market now spends roughly three and a half times as much capital, per company that progresses, as it did before 2021.
Mia Scarlett: The seed market has re-priced its inputs and not its outputs. Round sizes tripled since 2018; the share of companies that clear the next bar fell by two-thirds. Both facts are usually reported as separate stories — “seed rounds are bigger” and “Series A is harder” — and they only mean something together. A seed fund building a portfolio on the 2019 assumption that roughly one in three companies graduates is running reserves against a number that no longer exists in the data. Uncork’s Andy McLoughlin told Crunchbase the mortality rate from seed to A will be much higher; the 2024 cohort’s 16% is what that sounds like before it finishes happening.
Series A and Series B Funding Statistics: Where the Valuation Split Opens
Early-stage dollars roughly doubled year over year while early-stage deal count fell. That combination — more money, fewer deals — is the AI premium arriving at the Series A and B tables.
The Series A valuation gap
Carta’s Q1 2026 State of Private Markets report, published May 29, 2026, states the divergence in the plainest available terms: an AI foundational model startup at Series A might raise at a $300 million median valuation, while a non-AI startup at the same stage sits at $55 million. According to Axis Intelligence Research that is a 5.45x spread at the same nominal stage.
Carta’s own framing is the important part: these are not comparable markets. A founder benchmarking against a blended Series A median is benchmarking against a number that describes neither of the two populations inside it.
Series B and C valuations against the early stages
| Metric | Value | Period | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Series B median pre-money valuation change, YoY | +17.2% | Q1 2026 | Carta |
| Series C median pre-money valuation change, YoY | +12.5% | Q1 2026 | Carta |
| Series A AI valuation premium over non-AI | +38% | Full-year 2025 | Carta |
| Series E+ AI valuation premium over non-AI | +193% | Full-year 2025 | Carta |
| Series E+ median valuation change, YoY | +667% | Full-year 2025 | Carta |
| Series D capital share going to AI startups | 58% | Full-year 2025 | Carta |
Carta’s reading of the Series B and C gains is that AI companies which won early are maturing into later letters. That is a testable claim: if it holds, the Series D and E+ premia should widen further through 2026 while the Series A premium compresses as AI saturates the stage. Axis Intelligence Research will publish the Q2 and Q3 readings against that expectation rather than restating Carta’s interpretation.
Deal terms have moved toward founders at every stage
Down rounds fell to 11.4% of new fundings in Q1 2026 on Carta, from a 2023 peak of 22% and back in line with 2019 and 2020 levels. Median dilution across seed through Series C fell from about 18% to about 16% over 2025, and to 12.9% at Series B specifically, from about 15%. Carta’s 2025 year in review also records liquidation preferences and participation rights near multi-year lows.
The terms are better because the competition for the deals that clear the bar is fierce. The bar itself moved: Uncork Capital told Crunchbase that $1 million in ARR no longer qualifies a company for Series A, and that $2 million to $4 million is the working expectation in the AI era.
Pre-Seed Funding Statistics: The Stage Below the Data
Pre-seed is where most companies actually start, and it is the stage least visible in quarterly venture reports because most of it is unpriced.
Carta’s State of Pre-Seed: Q1 2026, published May 14, 2026, records about 3,000 U.S. startups raising over $2.3 billion in pre-seed capital in the quarter, a total Carta expects to settle near $2.9 billion once late entries land. According to Axis Intelligence Research, that is an average of $0.77 million per company on the as-reported total and $0.97 million on Carta’s expected revision — a useful anchor because it sits below every headline seed number quoted in this article.
| Pre-seed metric | Q1 2026 | Comparison | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Companies raising | ~3,000 | — | Carta |
| Capital raised, as reported | $2.3B | Expected to reach ~$2.9B | Carta |
| Convertible notes, share of rounds | 7% | Record low | Carta |
| Convertible notes, share of dollars | 8% | — | Carta |
| Rounds between $1M and $2.5M | 18% of rounds | 24% in Q1 2023 | Carta |
| AI share of pre-seed dollars | ~50% | ~30% a few years earlier | Carta |
Two structural facts sit in that table. The SAFE is now the default instrument at the earliest stage, with convertible notes at a record low share. And the middle of the pre-seed distribution is hollowing: the $1 million to $2.5 million band has lost six points of share in three years while rounds under $1 million and above $2.5 million both hold. Carta’s phrasing is that the same pool of cash is becoming less evenly distributed — the pattern that repeats at every stage above it.
How Much of the Stage Data Sits Outside the Venture Datasets?
Crunchbase and Carta describe the venture-tracked universe. The regulatory filings describe the whole private market, and the gap between them is the reason no venture dataset should be read as a measure of startup capital formation.
Companies raised $2.4 trillion through 34,553 Regulation D offerings in 2025, according to a Congressional Research Service analysis published March 24, 2026, drawing on the SEC’s Regulation D offering statistics, which cover calendar years 2009 through 2025 and were last updated March 17, 2026. Fund-level supply is covered in our venture capital statistics. The SEC’s own Office of the Advocate for Small Business Capital Formation reports that in the twelve months to June 30, 2025, U.S. private companies raised $840 billion excluding pooled investment vehicles — 36% of all capital raised — with about 12,313 Rule 506(b) private placements carrying 40% of that private-company total.
Against those denominators, the venture-tracked stage figures are a small and highly selective slice. Regulation D captures pooled funds, real estate vehicles and mature private companies alongside startups, so the numbers are not substitutes for one another and Axis Intelligence Research does not merge them. What the filings do establish is scale: the SEC counts more than 3,600 venture capital funds managing about $473 billion as of the second quarter of 2025 — the supply side of every stage figure on this page.
Cross-system non-merge statement. Regulation D proceeds are self-reported on Form D across all issuer types and include pooled investment vehicles; Crunchbase and Carta stage totals cover operating startups only, on different stage definitions and different reporting lags. Axis Intelligence Research publishes both and computes no ratio between them.
Mia Scarlett: The instinct when you have a $2.4 trillion number and a $205 billion number on the same page is to divide one by the other. Resist it. Form D is a filing obligation, not a venture tracker; a single real estate syndication files the same form as a Series B. The useful comparison is not between the systems but within each — Reg D against Reg D, quarter against quarter. That discipline is also why the venture stage figures on this page are only ever compared to other venture stage figures from the same publisher.
Which Stage Is Growing Fastest in North America?
North America absorbed $392 billion in H1 2026 — 76.9% of the global total — and $137.2 billion in Q2 alone. Formation volumes for the same market are tracked separately in our business formation statistics.
| Stage | Q2 2026 | Share of North American quarter | Change | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Seed and angel | $4.9B | 3.6% | −15% QoQ, −27% YoY | Crunchbase; shares by Axis Intelligence Research |
| Early stage (Series A–B) | $31.0B | 22.6% | +15% QoQ, ~2x YoY | Crunchbase |
| Late stage and technology growth | $101.0B | 73.6% | — | Crunchbase |
| All stages | $137.2B | 100% | — | Crunchbase |
Seed is the only stage falling in North America, on both a quarterly and an annual basis, in the largest venture quarter but one on record. That is the single most citable fact on this page and it is the one the aggregate headlines bury.
The early-stage figure needs its own caveat, and it is a large one. A single deal — the $12 billion financing for physical-AI startup Prometheus — accounts for 38.7% of the entire North American early-stage total by Axis Intelligence Research’s calculation on the rounded stage figure. Crunchbase, working from its unrounded number, describes the same deal as more than 40% of the stage. Either way: strip that one round out and North American early-stage funding is roughly $19 billion, not $31 billion, and the “early stage doubled” headline becomes something considerably more modest.
Concentration at the top of the ladder
- Sixteen companies raised billion-dollar rounds globally in Q2 2026, totalling $108.6 billion, or 53% of the quarter.
- Anthropic alone raised $65 billion at a $965 billion post-money valuation — 31.7% of global Q2 funding by Axis Intelligence Research’s calculation.
- OpenAI and Anthropic together took $217 billion in H1, 42.5% of all global startup funding.
- AI captured more than 70% of global capital in Q2 2026 and about 80% in North America, against roughly 45% globally a year earlier.
What Do Stage Statistics Look Like on Cap Table Data?
Crunchbase counts announced rounds. Carta counts cap tables. Where the two agree, the finding is durable; where they diverge, the divergence is itself informative.
On Carta, U.S. startups raised $119.5 billion across 4,859 new rounds in 2025, a 16.9% annual increase in dollars on the lowest round count in at least six years — down 41% from the 2021 peak. Axis Intelligence Research computes an average round size of $24.59 million across that year. In Q4 2025 specifically, $36.1 billion across 1,195 rounds gives $30.21 million, matching the $30.2 million Carta publishes and confirming the two figures are internally consistent.
Carta’s Q1 2026 quarter recorded $30.4 billion, with over 60 cents of every venture dollar going to AI companies — the highest share in its record. Foundational model companies took 14.2% of all capital, which Axis Intelligence Research computes as 23.7% of AI capital, matching Carta’s “nearly a quarter” characterisation. Within SaaS, 83% of capital went to AI startups, a concentration also visible in our AI investment statistics.
Liquidity is returning unevenly. Carta counted 34 IPOs pricing in Q1 2026 raising $9.9 billion, and 396 tender offers across 2025 — up 62% on 2024, with nearly a fifth coming from companies at Series E or later. For most companies in the cap-table universe the secondary market and the tender offer, not the public listing, remain the working liquidity mechanism.
Startup Funding by Stage: Full Reference Table
| Stage | Typical U.S. round size (median) | What the 2026 data shows | Primary source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pre-seed | ~$0.77M–$0.97M average per company | SAFEs dominant; convertible notes at 7% of rounds; $1M–$2.5M band shrinking | Carta, Q1 2026 |
| Seed | $3.0M (Q1 $1.0M, Q3 $5.6M) | Global stage dollars up 16.5% YoY but share halved to 5.9%; 16% graduation for the 2024 cohort | Crunchbase, 2025–2026 |
| Series A | $15.0M (Q1 $7.0M, Q3 $25.0M) | $300M median valuation for AI foundational models vs $55M non-AI; ARR bar now $2M–$4M | Crunchbase; Carta, Q1 2026 |
| Series B | — | Median pre-money valuation +17.2% YoY; median dilution down to 12.9% | Carta, Q1 2026 |
| Series C | — | Median pre-money valuation +12.5% YoY | Carta, Q1 2026 |
| Series D | — | 58% of stage capital went to AI startups in 2025 | Carta, 2025 |
| Series E and later | — | AI valuation premium 193%; median valuation +667% YoY; nearly 20% of 2025 tender offers | Carta, 2025 |
Methodology
Collection. Every figure on this page was retrieved from a primary source document during production on August 9, 2026, and logged with its URL and retrieval date in the accompanying CSV. No figure was taken from summary articles, aggregators or encyclopaedic sources. The stage totals come from Crunchbase’s quarterly global and North American venture reports for Q2 2025, Q1 2026 and Q2 2026, and from its May 2026 seed cohort analysis. Cap-table figures come from Carta’s Q1 2026 and full-year 2025 State of Private Markets reports, its Q1 2026 State of Pre-Seed report, and its Q1 2026 VC fund performance report. Regulatory figures come from the SEC’s Regulation D offering statistics, the SEC Office of the Advocate for Small Business Capital Formation FY2025 staff report, SEC Private Fund Statistics for Q2 2025, and Congressional Research Service report R48885.
Stage definitions. Crunchbase and Carta classify stages differently, and this page does not blend them. Crunchbase’s seed and angel tier includes pre-seed, angel and certain rounds at or below $3 million; early stage covers Series A and B plus certain rounds between $3 million and $15 million; late stage covers Series C onward plus certain rounds above $15 million; technology growth covers private equity rounds raised by previously venture-backed companies. Carta reports by named round on the cap table. Where both publishers cover the same concept, the figures appear side by side with their publisher named, and no ratio is computed across them.
Formulas. Capital Stage Gradient: CSG = (late-stage + technology growth capital) ÷ (seed + angel capital), same quarter, same dataset, same geography. Seed capital per graduating company: median seed round ÷ graduation rate, with the round size fixed at the 2025 U.S. median of $3.0 million so that variation reflects graduation rates only. Early-stage residual for global Q2 2026: total − late stage − seed. Stage shares: stage dollars ÷ quarterly total. Every calculated row in the CSV carries axis_calculated = yes and a method note.
Scope and caveats. Venture datasets under-report the earliest stages at the moment a quarter closes and revise upward for weeks afterward, so seed and pre-seed readings on this page are floors. Crunchbase converts foreign currency at the historic spot rate on the reporting date. Carta’s universe is U.S. companies using its cap-table platform and skews toward technology and venture-backed firms. Two figures published by Crunchbase in its Q2 2026 global report are internally inconsistent with its own totals; both are documented above and retained in the dataset rather than quietly corrected. Regulation D data is self-reported on Form D across all issuer types, including pooled funds, and is not comparable to venture stage totals.
About This Dataset
startup-funding-statistics-by-stage-2026.csv contains 129 observations across 15 columns covering global, North American and U.S. venture funding by stage from Q2 2025 through Q2 2026, U.S. seed cohort graduation rates from the pre-2021 baseline through the 2024 cohort, cap-table round sizes, valuations, dilution and down-round rates by named stage, pre-seed instrument mix, and U.S. exempt-offering totals. Every row carries the source organisation, source document, source URL, retrieval date, a primary-source flag, an Axis-calculated flag and, where calculated, the method note pointing to the formula disclosed above. Capital Stage Gradient readings and their inputs are included.
The dataset is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0) and mirrored to Hugging Face, Kaggle and GitHub. Reuse is permitted, including commercially, with attribution.
Citation: Axis Intelligence Research, Startup Funding Statistics by Stage 2026, 2026.
Cite This Page
APA — Axis Intelligence Research, & Scarlett, M. (2026). Startup funding statistics by stage 2026: Seed, Series A through Series D, and the Capital Stage Gradient. Axis Intelligence. https://axis-intelligence.com/startup-funding-statistics-by-stage/
MLA — Axis Intelligence Research, and Mia Scarlett. “Startup Funding Statistics by Stage 2026: Seed, Series A Through Series D, and the Capital Stage Gradient.” Axis Intelligence, 9 Aug. 2026, axis-intelligence.com/startup-funding-statistics-by-stage/.
Chicago — Axis Intelligence Research and Mia Scarlett. “Startup Funding Statistics by Stage 2026: Seed, Series A Through Series D, and the Capital Stage Gradient.” Axis Intelligence, August 9, 2026. https://axis-intelligence.com/startup-funding-statistics-by-stage/.
Frequently Asked Questions About Startup Funding by Stage
What is the Capital Stage Gradient and how is it calculated?
The Capital Stage Gradient (CSG™) is an Axis Intelligence Research metric equal to late-stage and technology growth capital divided by seed and angel capital in the same quarter, dataset and geography. The Q2 2026 global reading is 11.2, against 5.3 in Q2 2025. It uses Crunchbase’s published stage definitions with no adjustment, so any reader can recompute it from the linked quarterly reports.
How much seed capital does a fund now deploy per company that reaches Series A?
According to Axis Intelligence Research, $18.75 million at the 2024 cohort’s 16% graduation rate and the 2025 median U.S. seed round of $3.0 million, against $5.45 million on the pre-2021 benchmark rate of 55%. The calculation holds round size constant so the change reflects the funnel, not round inflation. Seed funds carrying reserve models built on 2019 graduation assumptions are reserving against a rate that the data no longer supports.
Why did seed funding fall in North America while every other stage rose?
North American seed and angel funding was $4.9 billion in Q2 2026, down 15% quarter over quarter and 27% year over year, while early stage rose about 15% and late stage reached roughly $101 billion. Part of the fall is reporting lag — seed totals rise for weeks after a quarter closes. The rest reflects capital concentrating into fewer, larger rounds at every stage: the same pattern Carta documents in pre-seed, where the $1 million to $2.5 million band has lost six points of share since 2023.
What ARR does a Series A require in 2026?
The $1 million ARR threshold no longer applies. Uncork Capital told Crunchbase that startups are expected to show $2 million to $3 million, and in some cases $4 million, in the AI era. The median interval from seed to Series A has also stretched past two years since 2023, which means a seed round sized for eighteen months of runway is now sized short of the milestone it is meant to fund.
How large is the AI valuation premium by stage?
Carta reports the premium widening with each letter. At Series A the median AI valuation ran 38% above non-AI in 2025; by Series E and later the premium reached 193%. In Q1 2026 Carta puts an AI foundational model company at a $300 million median Series A valuation against $55 million for a non-AI company at the same stage — a 5.45x spread by Axis Intelligence Research’s calculation, and the reason a blended Series A median describes almost no real company.
Are down rounds and dilution still a risk for founders raising in 2026?
Less so than at any point since 2020 on cap-table evidence. Carta puts the down-round rate at 11.4% in Q1 2026, down from a 22% peak in 2023, with median dilution across seed through Series C falling from about 18% to about 16% over 2025 and to 12.9% at Series B. Liquidation preferences and participation rights sit near multi-year lows. The terms improved for companies that clear the bar; the bar is what moved.
Do Crunchbase and Carta stage figures mean the same thing?
No, and they should not be averaged. Crunchbase classifies announced rounds into seed and angel, early stage, late stage and technology growth using dollar thresholds alongside round labels. Carta reports the named round on the cap table for U.S. companies on its platform. The two answer different questions — market-wide announced capital versus verified cap-table events — and Axis Intelligence Research publishes them side by side with the publisher named rather than blending them into a single series.
Why is the venture stage total so much smaller than SEC exempt-offering data?
They measure different universes. Companies raised $2.4 trillion through 34,553 Regulation D offerings in 2025 per SEC statistics as analysed by the Congressional Research Service, but Form D covers pooled investment vehicles, real estate syndications and mature private companies alongside startups. Crunchbase and Carta cover operating startups only. Axis Intelligence Research publishes both and computes no ratio between them.
What share of venture capital now goes to AI, by stage?
More than 70% of global capital in Q2 2026 and about 80% in North America, against roughly 45% globally a year earlier. On Carta’s U.S. cap-table data the share crossed 60% in Q1 2026, with foundational model companies alone taking 14.2% of all capital. At pre-seed, AI’s share of dollars reached about 50%, up from roughly 30% a few years earlier. The concentration is now visible at every rung of the ladder, not only the top.
What would push the Capital Stage Gradient back down?
Two things, and only two: seed dollars rising faster than late-stage dollars, or the megarounds stopping. The second is the larger lever — sixteen billion-dollar rounds carried 53% of global Q2 2026 funding, and Anthropic alone carried 31.7%. A quarter without a frontier-lab megaround would compress the reading sharply without a single additional seed dollar being deployed, which is exactly why the gradient is published alongside the early-stage-to-seed ratio of 4.9 as a check.
Related Axis Intelligence Research datasets: startup statistics, startup failure rate statistics, business formation statistics, venture capital statistics, AI investment statistics, fintech funding statistics.