How to Raise a Pre-Seed and Seed Round in 2026 - Part I

Let’s start with a number. Between April and June this year, CherryPitch tracked 1,336 investor emails sent by 108 founders. When the deck attached to an email stated its own facts plainly (what the company does, how far along it is, how much it is raising), three in ten got a reply. When the investor had to work those facts out alone, fewer than one in ten did.

These were founders raising in the same quarter, in the same market. What changed was whether the person on the other end could see, in about two minutes, that this company fit them.

That idea runs through everything in this guide. I call it the Fit Stack, and it has three layers. Your round has to fit the milestone it is paying for. The investors you pitch have to be able to write that round at that price. And the partner who champions you has to be able to carry your story into a meeting you will never attend. When a raise stalls, find the layer that broke. Founders tend to rebuild the deck when the problem is sitting in their investor list.

Raising your first money touches nearly every part of a company, so this guide comes in two parts. Part I, which you are reading now, covers everything that has to be true before you send the first email. Part II covers the raise itself, from the first meeting to the signed term sheet. Read them in order the first time. After that, treat them as a reference you come back to, since each section stands on its own.

What Part I covers

Part II continues with Fundraising 101, Term Sheets and the Rules Worth Keeping.

Before we talk about investors, we need a shared vocabulary and some arithmetic. This section covers both. Take your time with it, because most of the mistakes that surface later in a raise trace back to something here.

Here is the simplest way I know to separate them. Pre-seed money bets on the people. Seed money bets on the first evidence that the people were right.

Pre-seed is the first outside money a company takes, after the founders’ own savings and sometimes a little from friends and family. It usually arrives as SAFEs, in checks from angels, small pre-seed funds and accelerators. Very often nobody leads. Checks get signed one at a time over weeks or months and stack on top of each other. On Carta in Q2 2026, 93% of pre-seed rounds used SAFEs, and the average SAFE was $276,000, the highest in more than four years. Keep in mind that this is one check. A pre-seed round is usually several of them.

Seed is usually the first round with an institutional lead: one firm that sets the price and the terms, takes the largest allocation and often asks for a board seat. That lead is buying early proof. It might be users who keep coming back, design partners who renew, or a sales motion that has worked more than once.

The line between the two has blurred. Some companies skip pre-seed entirely. Others raise a round they call seed that looks a lot like a large pre-seed. Don’t get attached to the label. Investors care about what your round is buying, and you should too.

Now the numbers, and here you need to be careful about sources. Two respected data providers publish two different seed medians for 2026, and both are accurate.

The gap comes from what each one counts. Carta’s figure describes priced rounds, which lean toward companies that already have a lead and some momentum. PitchBook counts everything labeled seed. If you are raising your first institutional money before meaningful revenue, the PitchBook number is closer to your reality. If you have a committed lead and traction a stranger can verify, use Carta’s.

Two adjustments before you compare yourself with any of these medians. AI companies took 49% of all pre-seed dollars on Carta in the first half of 2026, and that pulls every headline number upward. If you are not building in AI, read the medians with that in mind. And if you are raising in Europe, PitchBook put the median pre-money valuation for pre-seed and seed combined at €6 million in Q1 2026. Prices are lower there, and the logic in this guide works the same way.

You have three ways to take money at this stage. One question separates them: when does the price get set, and who sets it?

A SAFE, a simple agreement for future equity, is a contract that turns into shares at your next priced round. Nobody agrees on a price today. Two mechanisms stand in for it. The valuation cap sets the highest valuation at which the SAFE can convert. The discount, when there is one, lets the holder convert below the price new investors pay; a 20% discount means they convert at 80% of it.

On Carta in Q2 2026, 91% of SAFEs were post-money SAFEs. Of those, 73% used a cap as their only price mechanism and 21% combined a cap with a discount. The post-money version gives you the single most useful formula in this guide, so write it down: the investor’s ownership at conversion equals the check divided by the cap. A $500,000 SAFE on a $10 million cap becomes 5% of your company.

A convertible note does the same job as debt. It carries an interest rate and a maturity date. If you have not raised a priced round by the maturity date, the note turns into a negotiation, because the holder can in principle ask for the money back. Notes are less common than they used to be, and that maturity date is the reason to read one carefully.

A priced round sells actual shares at an agreed price per share. It comes with a full set of legal documents, a defined ownership stake for the lead, and usually a board seat. It costs more in legal fees and takes longer to close. In return, everyone knows exactly who owns what on the day it closes.

So how do you choose? Ask who is setting the terms. If your round is a collection of checks and nobody is acting as the lead, a SAFE matches the way the money is actually arriving. If a lead investor wants a specific ownership stake, a board seat and standard governance, price the round, and that lead’s terms become everyone’s terms. This is why pre-seed runs almost entirely on SAFEs and seed is split.

One warning, which we will come back to in Part II. A SAFE postpones the price, and it also postpones the moment you feel the dilution.

The default answer is "eighteen to twenty-four months of runway." It is a reasonable rule of thumb and a weak plan, because runway measures time and investors pay for evidence. I want you to start from the evidence instead. I call this pricing the milestone, and it takes four steps.

While you build that plan, check your hiring assumptions against today’s market. The average seed-stage company on Carta has 6.2 employees, down from 10.3 in 2021. A plan that assumes a 2021-sized team will read to investors as a plan written in 2021.

Then there is a second constraint, and it is the one founders rarely see. The amount you raise decides which investors are able to lead. A fund’s check size divided by its ownership target gives you the highest valuation it can accept, and both of those numbers were fixed when the fund itself was raised.

Let’s do the arithmetic. Raise $2 million at a $10 million post-money valuation and your lead writes roughly $1.2 million. That check fits funds somewhere between $40 million and $80 million. For a $250 million fund, the same check is half a percent of its capital, too small to matter to the fund’s returns. For a $15 million fund, it is 8% of everything in a single company, which its own rules usually forbid. Both of those funds will pass, for opposite reasons, and neither will tell you why.

So the round size you pick is also a decision about who you can raise from. Change the number and you change the list.

Once you have a number, run it through three checks before you say it out loud to an investor. Each one catches a different way a round goes wrong.

The match check. Does this amount reach the proof you named, and can the funds on your list lead it? This connects the two halves of 1.3. A round sized perfectly to your milestone that no fund on your list can lead is still the wrong round.

The dilution check. What will the founders own after the next priced round? Here is where SAFEs catch people. Say you raise $250,000 on a $6 million cap, then $500,000 on a $10 million cap, then $750,000 on a $15 million cap. Using the formula from 1.2, those convert into roughly 4.2%, 5.0% and 5.0%. That is about 14.2% of your company gone before your seed lead buys a single share. Sell 18% in the seed round and the founders are down to around 70%. Add the option pool expansion most leads ask for, and you lose several more points.

That’s how the median founding team on Carta ends up holding 56% after seed and 36% after Series A. Use those two numbers as your benchmark. If your SAFEs and seed round put you near Series A ownership levels before you have raised a Series A, fix the plan now, while the only cost is a smaller round or a different cap.

The sanity check. Can the company grow into this price? This is the check founders skip, because a high valuation feels like a win. The median valuation step-up from seed to Series A on Carta was 2.6x in 2025. Take the median priced seed at $24.3 million post-money and multiply: your Series A needs to come in somewhere above $63 million, and the company has to look like a $63 million company when that day comes. For reference, Carta’s median Series A post-money over the six months to July 2026 was $80 million.

The graduation data shows what happens when companies can’t grow into their price. Of companies that raised seed in 2018, 25% to 30% reached Series A within two years. For the 2022 cohort, which raised near peak prices, the figure was 17%. The highest price you can get today raises the bar your next round has to clear.

At pre-seed, the team is often the only part of the company an investor can actually inspect. The product may be a prototype. The revenue may not exist yet. So the investor underwrites the people, fully expecting the idea to change along the way. Even at seed, when there is some evidence to look at, the team carries more weight than founders expect.

I want you to think of this as five questions the investor is answering about you, whether or not they ask them out loud.

Why this team, for this market? This is founder-market fit, and it carries more weight the earlier you raise. Prior work in the industry counts. So does an unusual route to your first customers, or a technical insight the incumbents lack. A general claim of passion counts for very little. Be specific about what you know that a well-funded competitor would have to spend years learning.

Do the roles cover the company? Someone has to build the product and someone has to sell it. Investors want to see that each founder owns a part of the company that matters for this particular market, and that together you cover the first two years of work without an obvious hole. Two technical founders selling to enterprise buyers will be asked who sells. Two commercial founders building deep technology will be asked who builds.

How do you decide together? Roughly a quarter of co-founders leave within four years, according to Carta. Investors know this, so they probe how you handle disagreement, who has the final call and how long you have worked together. Answer with a real example: a disagreement you had, and how it ended.

Can you pull people in? Every strong person who joins you before the money arrives is proof that your story already persuades people who have other options. The median first hire on Carta receives 1.5% of the company, which tells you how much belief a strong first hire represents. If people with other options have joined you, say so early.

Can you grow as fast as the company? A seed investor is backing the team that will run a company several times larger in three years. They are looking for founders who learn quickly and know what they don’t know. The way you talk about your own gaps tells them a lot.

One more thing that sits outside the deck: your history arrives before you do. Investors read your cap table, the terms of any earlier money and how long you have been raising. A co-founder who left with a large block of equity, a cap set casually on a friends-and-family note, eight months in market: each of these will draw a question. Raise each one yourself, in a single sentence, along with what you changed afterward. It costs far less when you say it first.

A story about ghost equity. A couple of years ago I advised a founder who was left on his own when his co-founder walked out. They had written their agreement in the good days, and it did not hold up in the bad ones. She left two years in and kept her full 25% of the company. She has not worked in, on or around the business since, and she still owns a quarter of it.

Every investor who opened his cap table saw the same picture. A quarter of the company belonged to someone who no longer worked there. After two more rounds of dilution, the founder doing all the work would own too little to stay motivated through the hard years, and investors know exactly what that means. The rejections arrived one after another, all of them polite, with the same obvious reason underneath. Eventually he shut the company down.

If her stake had been closer to 5%, which is still a big share, I am convinced that company would be worth hundreds of millions today. Instead, both co-founders lost. If that isn’t a lose-lose, nothing is.

Write your founder agreement for the bad days. Standard vesting, usually four years with a one-year cliff, and clear terms for what happens when someone leaves exist so that one founder walking away doesn’t sink everyone who stays. And if a departed co-founder already holds a large stake in your company, work it out with a lawyer before you raise. Investors will see it the moment they open your cap table.

The gap is real, and you can measure it. In 2024, 35% of new startups on Carta had a solo founder, but only 17% of venture-backed startups did. Solo founders do raise. They raise from a smaller pool of investors, and they have to answer two questions that a founding team answers simply by existing.

The first is whether you can recruit. Answer it with the people who have already joined you, even part-time, and with the specific hire this round pays for.

The second is who challenges your decisions. A co-founder is someone who can tell you that you are wrong and make it stick. Name the people who play that role for you today, and how often you use them.

Please don’t add a co-founder to make the raise easier. A rushed co-founder relationship is one of the most expensive mistakes a company can make, and investors can usually tell when a title was handed out a month before the deck went out. Add a co-founder when the company needs that person.

Being solo also works in your favor in one place, and it is a place that matters: your investor list. Plenty of investors will not back a solo founder, and many of them make it obvious in their thesis or their portfolio. Every one of those is a firm you can cross off before you write a single email. What remains is a shorter list of investors who have backed solo founders before and know how to underwrite one. You will pitch fewer firms, a higher share of them will be able to say yes, and you will spend less of your year fundraising.

To find them, read portfolios. Look for companies a fund backed when there was a single founder at the time of the first check, and check whether the fund followed on. An investor who has done that three times already understands the bet you are asking them to make.

The median advisor grant on Carta is 0.24% of the company at pre-seed and 0.12% at seed. Investors know those numbers as well as you do, which is why a slide of advisor headshots rarely moves anyone. A grant that size usually buys a few hours a month.

An advisor helps your raise when you can point to something they did: an introduction that became a customer, a hire they helped close, a pricing decision they changed. Put that result on the slide next to their name.

There is one exception. In markets where a specific expertise reduces a risk investors are already pricing, such as regulatory approval, clinical validation, hardware manufacturing or security certification, the right advisor can stand in for a capability the team doesn’t have yet. In that case, say exactly which risk they reduce and how.

Here is something first-time founders rarely picture. The first time most investors hear about your company, you are not the one telling it. A partner retells it to the partnership on Monday morning. An associate summarizes it for the partner who decides. A founder in their portfolio forwards your email with two lines on top. An angel describes you to three other angels over dinner.

So the question for this section is what survives when someone else pitches your company. Everything below is built around that.

You will reach investors through several channels, and each one does a different job.

The deck is the artifact everything else points back to. Whatever channel opens the door, the deck is what gets opened next, usually on a phone and usually without you there.

The email is your story compressed into a few sentences, written so it can be forwarded untouched. If the recipient has to rewrite it before passing it on, most of the time they won’t bother.

Warm introductions get you read sooner. In our April to June data, introductions lifted the first reply and the first meeting, then stopped making a difference once the founder was in the room. They open the door. What you say once it is open is up to you.

Pitch events and demo days compress a lot of investor attention into a few minutes. The goal of a three-minute pitch is a follow-up meeting, so build it around the one or two things you want an investor to remember on the drive home.

Networking events give you thirty seconds in a conversation that could go anywhere. You need a version of your story short enough to say over a coffee and specific enough that the other person asks a second question.

Notice what these have in common. Each channel asks for the same story at a different length: one sentence for a conversation, one paragraph for an email, ten or so slides for the deck, thirty minutes for a meeting. If the one-sentence version is fuzzy, every longer version will be fuzzy too. That is why I want you to start with the narrative and choose the channels afterward.

Remember the number from the start of this guide: three in ten replies when the deck stated its facts plainly, fewer than one in ten when the reader had to infer them. Every fact a reader has to infer is a fact they can infer wrongly, and when they retell your story later, they will retell their version.

A clear seed narrative answers five questions, and it answers them without you in the room.

Four habits make a narrative travel well.

Lead with the shift, then show the product. Founders explain features because features are what they spend all day building. Investors think in market forces. "Our onboarding takes ten minutes" is a feature. "Mid-sized clinics now have to file the same compliance report every month, and none of the software they already own was built to produce it" is a shift. Your product becomes the evidence that you saw the shift first.

Name the risk that worries them most. Everyone in a partner meeting is quietly pricing what could go wrong. When you name the biggest risk yourself and show what you have already done to reduce it, an unknown fear becomes a known cost, and known costs are much easier to approve.

Give them one number they can check. A single metric a skeptical colleague could verify does more for your champion than five impressive ones they would have to defend.

Assume a machine is reading you, too. Today many investors, maybe all of them by now, use AI in their process. They run your deck through a model to find the inconsistencies. They record the video call and ask an LLM to find the gaps between what you said and what your deck claims. Anything that isn’t real has become extremely easy to spot.

So my advice here is simple. Don’t stretch the truth. If you don’t lie, you never have to remember what you said last time. Believe in your story and live it, and everything else in this section gets easier. You might turn out to be wrong about your bet. The conviction you show while making it can still win you the round, because early-stage fundraising is about the founder. How honest you are and how much you care count for more than a revenue projection nobody built from the bottom up.

That is also why clarity matters more than volume. Your job is to make the story clear, and you can leave most of the detail for later. Let investors ask their questions, then answer them with confidence. Build your deck with that same confidence.

The pitch deck is still the standard document of an early-stage raise, so it deserves more of your time than anything else in this section. Assume it will be read on a phone, in about two minutes, between two other meetings. Here is what near-perfect looks like under those conditions.

The first slide says what the company does in one sentence a stranger understands. Leave the tagline for the website. If a reader finishes slide one without knowing what you sell and to whom, the next nine slides are working uphill.

Every headline states the takeaway. "Market" is a label. "Mid-market logistics teams spend $40,000 a year on manual reconciliation" is a takeaway. A reader who only skims the headlines should still get your whole argument.

One idea per slide. If a slide needs you to explain it, it will fail when you are absent, which is most of the time.

Slides three to five carry the weight. That is where a reader decides whether to keep going, so put your sharpest material there: the problem stated sharply, the shift and your evidence.

The last slide is the round. How much, on what instrument, what milestone it reaches and roughly when. Investors should never have to email you to find out what you are raising.

Keep it to about ten to twelve slides. Everything else can live in an appendix or come up in the meeting.

One more distinction. A buyer and an investor are asking different questions. A buyer wants to know whether your product solves a problem this quarter. An investor wants to know whether a market is about to move and whether your company is where it will move to. Build a deck for each, and never send one to the other.

Where the memo fits. A deck earns the first meeting. After a good first meeting, follow up with a short memo, two or three pages, laying out the argument in order: problem, shift, evidence, the main risk and how you are reducing it, the milestone. Some founders lead with a memo instead of a deck, and for a technical or complex company it can work well. For most founders, the deck opens the door and the memo arms the person who has to argue for you, which brings us to the most important idea in this section.

Picture the room you will never enter. A partner who liked your meeting has five minutes at the Monday partner meeting. Their colleagues have not met you and have a dozen other companies to discuss. Your partner has to explain what you do, why it matters now, why you, and why this is worth one of the fund’s limited slots. Then someone asks the hard question, and your partner has to answer it on your behalf.

That retelling is the real pitch. Each time a story passes from one person to the next, details fall away and the simplest parts survive. Your job is to decide in advance which parts survive.

The person retelling your story changes with the investor. It might be an associate briefing a partner, a partner briefing the partnership, a scout passing you to their fund, an angel describing you to a syndicate, or a founder introducing you to their own investor. The work is the same in every case: hand them a version they can repeat accurately.

Write the paragraph you want pasted into the partner meeting. Put it at the top of your follow-up email or memo: one sentence on what you are, one number they can check, the objection the room will raise with your answer, and one line connecting you to a bet the fund has already made. Make it good enough that your champion copies it word for word.

Answer the room’s objection before the room raises it. You will usually hear the hardest question in your first meeting. Write the answer down, in a form your champion can say out loud in fifteen seconds.

Make the forward effortless. Every email you send an investor should survive being forwarded without edits. Short, plain and with the deck attached or linked.

Before you send your deck to a single investor, test whether it can pitch without you. It takes an afternoon.

Give the deck to someone who has never heard of your company. Let them read it on their phone for two minutes, then take the phone back. Ask them three questions. What does this company do? Why does it matter now? How much is it raising, and what will that money prove?

Write down their answers word for word and compare them with your one-sentence story. Where their version differs from yours, the deck failed to say what you thought it said. Fix the deck, rather than adding to your explanation, because you will not be there to explain.

Then run it once more with someone who knows your industry, and add a fourth question: what is the biggest risk in this company? If they name a risk your deck never addresses, you now know what the partner meeting will ask, and you have time to answer it on a slide.

Run the test again after every major revision. It is the cheapest feedback you will get during the whole raise.

You have probably heard that fundraising is a numbers game. Send enough emails, take enough meetings, and eventually someone says yes. There is some truth in it. Rejection is the default, and you will need a lot of conversations to find the few investors who will commit.

But look at what the numbers actually are. A raise is a funnel: how many investors you contact, what share of them could plausibly invest in a company like yours, what share reply, what share take a second meeting, and what share write a check. Founders push hard on the first number, because sending more emails feels like progress. The second number is the one that decides the outcome, and almost nobody measures it.

Here is the arithmetic. Contact eighty investors where a quarter of them fit your round and you have twenty real conversations available to you. Contact eighty where one in twenty fits and you have four, with the same deck and the same hours of work. In our April to June data, founders working from a curated, well-fit list more than doubled their reply rate compared with lists they had sourced themselves. And in our Q1 2026 analysis of 1,032 decks, 48% of first uploads produced no investor matches at all, because the deck signaled a different stage, size or risk from what the founder believed.

So yes, it is a numbers game. The number that matters is the share of your list that is able to say yes. This section is about raising that share.

Before you build any list, you need to know who you are talking to, because each kind of investor is spending a different kind of money and needs something different from you.

Angels invest their own money in startups as a regular practice. Many are former founders or operators. They decide alone or with a small group, they can move in days, and they usually understand how early-stage companies work. At pre-seed, they are often the round.

High-net-worth individuals also invest their own money, but startups are not their main activity. Think of a successful doctor, a business owner, a senior executive, or a family office managing a family’s wealth. They tend to invest in founders they know or are introduced to through someone they trust. They may need more explanation of how SAFEs and dilution work, and they sometimes ask for unusual terms because they have not seen standard ones. In the US, securities rules generally restrict who can invest in a private startup round, usually to accredited investors, so talk to your lawyer before you accept money from anyone outside the professional investor world.

VC funds invest other people’s money. Their limited partners, typically pension funds, endowments, foundations and wealthy families, gave them capital to deploy over a fixed period and expect it back several times over. That changes everything about how they decide. A fund has ownership targets, a limited number of slots, reserves to protect and a partnership that has to agree. It moves slower than an angel and asks for more, and in return it can lead your round, set clean terms and follow on later.

The practical takeaway: at pre-seed, your audience is mostly angels, a few high-net-worth individuals and pre-seed funds. At seed, your audience is the VC fund that can lead, plus a small number of angels around it. Pitch each one on what they need, and stop pitching the wrong audience for your stage.

When you raise from angels, you can work with individuals or with organized groups, and the experience is very different.

Individual angels come in a few flavors, and it helps to know which one you are talking to.

Angel networks and groups are organized clubs of individual investors. Typically you apply, get screened, pitch to the members at a meeting, and then each member decides individually whether to invest. They can bring you a lot of small checks through one process, but that process can take weeks or months. Be careful with any group that charges founders a fee to pitch.

Syndicates work differently. A lead angel finds the deal, does the diligence and invites a pool of backers to invest alongside them through a single vehicle. You get one larger check and one line on your cap table instead of twenty. Most of your relationship runs through the lead, so the lead is the person you are really evaluating.

Whichever route you take, use one rule. I call it give every check a job. Before an angel gets an allocation, write down what that check comes with: a hire they will help close, three customer introductions, credibility with a specific fund. If you can’t name the job, the check is just money, and money is the easiest part of a round to replace.

At pre-seed, take angels freely when each one has a job, because they are your round. At seed, keep the angel allocation small enough that your lead still reaches its ownership target. A lead that has to fight a long list of angels for its stake may simply walk away.

And activate them once the money arrives. Angels rarely volunteer their help. Within the first month, send each one a specific request tied to the job you wrote down.

These two get mixed up all the time, so let’s separate them.

An accelerator runs a fixed-length program, usually a few months, for a cohort of companies. It invests a set amount for a set stake, surrounds you with mentors and peers, and ends with a Demo Day where investors see the whole batch.

An incubator usually works with companies even earlier, sometimes at the idea stage, and for longer. It often provides space, tools and support, and it may be run by a university, a corporation or a local program. Some take equity and some don’t.

Treat any offer from either one the way you would treat a term sheet: work out the price.

Y Combinator’s standard deal is $500,000 in two parts: $125,000 on a post-money SAFE for 7% of the company, and $375,000 on an uncapped SAFE with a most-favored-nation provision. Using the formula from 1.2, the first part prices your company at about $1.8 million post-money. The second converts on the best terms you give any other SAFE investor during the program.

The cash is rarely the reason to take a deal like that. You are buying everything around it: a batch of peers, a brand investors recognize, a structure that forces weekly progress, and a Demo Day that pulls investor attention into one short window. That last part has real value, because it turns a slow, one-at-a-time raise into a parallel one.

So here is the test I want you to use. An accelerator is worth its price when it changes who will take your meeting. If the investors who fit your round would not take your call today, a top program can change that within a single batch. If you already have access to the investors who fit your round, you are paying a meaningful share of your company for things you partly have.

For any other program, ask three questions before you accept. How many recent alumni raised a round within a year of finishing? Which investors actually attended the last Demo Day? And how much of your company does the program take, for how much money? For programs run by venture funds, add a fourth: does taking their money create an expectation that they lead your next round?

To raise from a venture fund, you need to understand the math the fund lives by, because that math decides most passes before anyone reads your deck.

The power law. Venture returns are wildly uneven. In a typical fund, one or two companies have to pay back the entire fund, so every new investment gets judged on one question: could this company plausibly be one of those? The size of the fund sets how big that outcome has to be. A $40 million fund needs a very different winner from a $400 million one.

Slots and reserves. Take a $40 million seed fund. It makes about thirty first investments over roughly four years, fewer than eight a year, and it holds back about half its capital to invest again in companies it already owns. So a $700,000 first check from that fund buys a portfolio slot, a claim on those reserves, a board seat and a partner’s attention for a decade. The check is the smallest thing it spends.

Pre-seed funds run the same logic at a smaller scale. A $30 million pre-seed fund might put $12 million into first checks of about $500,000, which covers twenty-four companies. Perhaps eight to ten of them raise again and get another $1.2 to $1.5 million each. When a pre-seed investor presses you about your next round, they are deciding whether you look like one of those eight to ten.

Ownership. Remember 1.3: a fund’s check size divided by its ownership target is the highest valuation it can accept. That is why a fund will pass on a company it likes when the price is wrong for its model.

Timing and capacity. A fund invests new money for a few years after it closes, then mostly supports the companies it already has. A fund near the end of that period, or one that just made several bets in your space, may have no room for you no matter what it thinks of your company. This is the hardest thing to see from outside, and the most common reason a warm conversation quietly ends.

Multi-stage firms at seed. Large firms that invest from seed through late stage write small early checks to buy access to companies they hope will need their Series A. That makes the check valuable when they lead your next round and costly when they don’t, because every Series A investor you meet will ask why the firm closest to you passed. Take the money when the partner is right for you, and go in knowing the signal you are buying.

The partner. You raise from a person. That person carries your story into the partner meeting from section 3.4, usually takes your board seat, and becomes the reference every future investor checks. Two partners at the same firm can hold different theses, different records in your category and different amounts of internal credibility to spend. Choose the partner as carefully as you choose the firm. Find the one whose past investments look most like you, and read what they have written before you ask for their time.

Now we put it together. Every investor database lets you filter by sector and stage, so most lists get built that way. Those two filters remove the fewest investors. Four filters do the real work, and I want you to apply them in this order.

Add your own filters on top. If you are a solo founder, keep only the investors who have backed solo founders before, as we discussed in 2.2. If you are building in a regulated market, keep the ones who have done it before.

Geography matters in two concrete ways. Some funds can legally invest only in certain countries or structures, and some raised their money on a regional mandate. Beyond that, let fit decide and let geography follow. The map is shifting, too. The Bay Area still leads pre-seed activity on Carta, but in Q2 2026 Texas took 9% of pre-seed capital, overtaking New York for second place among states. Wherever you are based, include a few funds from the market where your likely Series A investors sit. Your seed lead will be calling them in two years, and it helps if they already know your name.

For every investor that survives, write down four things: fund size and vintage, typical first check, one or two portfolio companies that place you in their comparison set, and the specific partner, with a reason for choosing that person. Four columns you have actually filled in beat forty you skimmed.

Thirty to fifty firms that survive all four filters is a real list. Eighty names pulled from a database is a mailing list.

Then do the uncomfortable check. Look at the companies these firms have already backed and ask where you actually land against them. If you are median on every dimension, that is the pass you will keep hearing, and no email sequence will change it. Better to learn that from a spreadsheet in week one than from twenty polite nos in week nine.

Running those four filters by hand takes about twenty minutes per firm, once you have found the fund size, the check range and the portfolio overlap. Most founders never finish, which is why so many raises are aimed at investors who were never able to say yes.

CherryPitch reads what your deck signals about stage, scope and risk, then matches you with investors whose fund construction and thesis can accommodate it. Every match comes with its reasoning, so you can see why a firm fits before you spend a meeting finding out.

That is everything that has to be true before your first email. You have a round sized to a milestone, a team story that holds up, a deck that can pitch without you, and a list of investors who are able to say yes.

Part II is about the raise itself. We will run the process, use fundraising intelligence to shorten it, prepare for investor questions, read polite nos, do due diligence in both directions, and go through the term sheet line by line.

What is the difference between pre-seed and seed?

Pre-seed is usually a company’s first outside money, mostly raised on SAFEs from angels, pre-seed funds and accelerators, often without a single lead. It is mainly a bet on the team. Seed is usually the first round with an institutional lead who sets the terms and often takes a board seat, and it is a bet on early evidence that the team was right.

How much should I raise at pre-seed in 2026?

Enough to reach the evidence that makes your seed round easy to lead, plus a margin for things taking longer than planned. On Carta in Q2 2026, 93% of pre-seed rounds used SAFEs and the average SAFE was $276,000, so most pre-seed rounds are assembled from several checks.

What is the average seed round size in 2026?

PitchBook-NVCA put the median US seed deal at $3.0 million in Q1 2026, counting every seed deal. Carta’s median priced seed round in software over the six months to July 2026 was $4.1 million at a $24.3 million post-money valuation.

Should I raise on a SAFE or a priced round?

Use a SAFE when your round is a collection of checks and nobody is setting the terms. Price the round when a lead investor wants a defined ownership stake and a board seat. Either way, model what every SAFE converts into before you sign the next one.

How many investors should I contact?

Thirty to fifty firms that survive filtering on fund size, the risk they buy, their portfolio and their capacity. The share of your list that could plausibly invest matters far more than its length.

Should I join an accelerator?

Join when it changes who will take your meeting. Work out the price first: Y Combinator’s standard deal values the first $125,000 at about $1.8 million post-money for 7% of the company.

Can a solo founder raise a seed round?

Yes. In 2024, 17% of venture-backed startups on Carta had a solo founder. The pool of investors is smaller, which makes your list shorter and sharper. Target investors who have backed solo founders before, and show that you can recruit and that someone challenges your decisions.

Do I need revenue to raise a pre-seed round?

No. Pre-seed rounds mostly buy down team risk. Investors need to believe you are the right team for this market and to understand exactly what this money will prove. If you have design partners or a waitlist of the right buyers, lead with it.

CherryPitch Fundraising Data, Q2 2026: 1,336 investor outreaches from 108 founders, April to June 2026. CherryPitch Deck Analysis, Q1 2026: 1,032 decks. Carta, VC Fundraising Benchmarks, July 2026. Carta, State of Pre-Seed, Q2 2026. Carta, SAFE valuation caps, Q2 2026. Carta, State of Seed, Winter 2025. Carta, graduation rates from seed to Series A, February 2025. PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor, Q1 2026. PitchBook European venture data, Q1 2026. Y Combinator, The YC Deal.

CherryPitch reads your deck the way an investor reads it, then shows you which investors your raise fits.