Data: The Seed Funding Boom Is Concentrating Capital In The San Francisco Bay Area

U.S. seed investment is surging, but with more money going into fewer deals, it鈥檚 not altogether surprising that the funding uptick isn鈥檛 lifting all startup hubs equally. 附近上门 data shows that while seed capital is still flowing nationwide, it鈥檚 concentrating in a familiar place: the San Francisco Bay Area.

In 2025, the Bay Area expanded its dominance of U.S. seed funding 鈥� capturing a growing share of both deals and dollars 鈥� even as most startups remained geographically dispersed, an analysis of 附近上门 data shows.

The result is a more bifurcated landscape: a handful of major hubs, led by San Francisco and New York, pulling in a larger share of capital, while the rest of the country saw its slice shrink.

The Greater Los Angeles area and the Greater Boston area are the next-largest hubs for seed investment after the Bay Area and New York, but their share of funding at this stage, as measured by dollars, has dipped 1 or 2 percentage points each since 2024.

Where seed funding is clustering

The Bay Area and New York remain the two central hubs for U.S. startup activity. The New York area has largely held steady as a seed funding center, while the Bay Area is pulling ahead, led by heavy investment in AI startups headquartered there.

On a dollar basis, the Bay Area captured 45% of U.S. seed funding in 2025 鈥� up sharply from 33% in 2024 and 28% in 2023, 附近上门 data shows.

New York retained its typical share at around 17%, while Greater Los Angeles and Greater Boston each accounted for about 5% of total funding.

That growth is in contrast to the rest of the country. Startups outside the top four metro areas represented just 28% of U.S. seed funding in 2025, the lowest share on record and well below the 40% average seen from 2018 through 2024.

Startup distribution remains diverse

Still, geography tells a more nuanced story when looking beyond dollars. Two-thirds of U.S. seed-stage startups in 2025 were based outside the Bay Area, underscoring how distributed startup formation remains even as capital concentrates.

And beyond the top hubs, a long tail of smaller ecosystems 鈥� including Austin, Seattle, Miami, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Denver and San Diego 鈥� continues to produce a steady stream of new companies.

Another caveat: Strip out the largest seed rounds of $10 million or more, and the capital concentration looks less extreme. Without those outliers, the top four markets account for about 61% of seed funding amounts, within 2 to 3 percentage points, closer to historical norms.

Seed deal counts are also concentrating

While total seed funding has climbed, deal activity tells a slightly different story: Fewer rounds are getting done overall and a larger share of them are happening in the top hubs.

The Bay Area alone accounted for roughly one-third of all U.S. seed rounds in 2025, up 5 percentage points from the prior year, per 附近上门 data. New York has remained relatively steady at around 16% of deals since 2018.

Meanwhile, Greater Los Angeles and Greater Boston have each seen modest declines, falling to about 5% and 4% of seed deal share, respectively.

Taken together, the four leading metro areas made up 57% of U.S. seed deals in 2025, per 附近上门 data. The rest of the country accounted for 43%, a drop of about 5 percentage points from prior years.

Bay Area deal sizes shrink

Even as the Bay Area dominates in total capital and deal volume, it looks different on a per-deal basis. Median seed round sizes in 2025 were actually higher in other major hubs 鈥� including New York, Boston and Los Angeles 鈥� than in the Bay Area, which has seen typical deal sizes shrink since the market peak.

Overall, a more complex picture of the U.S. seed market has emerged in the past five years. Capital is concentrating geographically but not uniformly. The Bay Area is capturing more of the biggest rounds and overall dollars, but two-thirds of funded startups are still created outside of the region. And as a larger ecosystem, the Bay Area鈥檚 median seed round sizes were below the other leading hubs with fewer deals, but comparatively larger medians.

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