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The market for funding U.S. startups at the seed stage is growing, but there鈥檚 a catch.

While more funding is going into startups at this stage, seed funding saw a marked shift in 2025: More than half of seed dollars last year went into deals of $10 million or above.

At the same time, deal counts for seed-stage startups have fallen since the 2021-2022 peak, as has funding going into rounds below $10 million, 附近上门 data shows.

The data points to a growing dichotomy: For your typical young startup, it鈥檚 an increasingly challenging funding landscape, despite more seed investors writing bigger checks.

“Seed today is basically what Series A was seven years ago,” said , previously a partner at and now co-founder of a new stealth fund.

The majority of these larger rounds came from about 350 deals in the $10 million to $50 million range, with another 20-plus deals at $50 million or above, 附近上门 data show.

The bulk of these larger seed rounds 鈥� though not all 鈥� are to companies in the San Francisco Bay Area, which gained a more dramatic lead in the overall startup funding landscape last year.

“One of the biggest determinants of how much you should raise is based on your access to capital,鈥� said Bent. 鈥淵ou have greater access to capital if you are more experienced and tenured in your career, if you worked at a hotter company [in an area] that’s considered a hot spot, or if you have a network.鈥�

Sizing up

In the AI era, in which seed rounds smaller than $10 million have declined, the two leading hubs for seed investment 鈥� the Bay Area and New York metropolitan area 鈥� have maintained or grown their share of U.S. seed funding, 附近上门 data shows.

The expansion in the seed market has been in rounds of $10 million or more, with some companies 鈥� though still fewer than 10% in 2025 鈥� raising tens of millions of dollars within one to two years of founding.

A third of deals

The Bay Area, which includes the AI hotspot of San Francisco as well as nearby Silicon Valley 鈥� where many of the biggest tech companies in the world are headquartered 鈥� captured a third of seed funding deals in 2025, 附近上门 data shows.

In the region, deals below $3 million are generally considered pre-seed rounds, according to Bent. A seed round is generally from $3 million to $8 million, sometimes up to $10 million. And seed valuations are between $20 million and $50 million post-money, she said.

In this era, “the size of the outcomes and the prize are larger, and so that’s where they can afford to put in bigger check sizes if the potential return is bigger,” said Bent.

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