Most early stage company financings go something like this these days:
(Self-funded / Friends and family / Accelerator / Pre-Seed Round) –> (Seed Round) –> (Late Seed Round) –> (Series A)
or:
(Seed) -> (Late Seed) -> (Series A)
Very few go from Seed directly to Series A which was the norm for a very long time in the venture capital industry. Why is this happening?
Following a seed round of $500k to $1m+ most saas companies increase headcount in engineering and product and eventually make their first commercial hires. Depending on the complexity of the sale and the size of license, most startup founders will close the first 10-20+ deals before hiring anyone in sales. If you are in a category where you can survive and grow through self-service, then most of your ‘commercial’ money will go towards growing your marketing and support/ops teams.
The best saas companies I’ve seen across Europe over the last two years raised less than $1m in seed and were able to get to $300k+ in MRR and continue to grow organically without needing venture $ (but still took venture $ to grow even faster). In very good cases, companies raised up to $1m in seed and by the time they closed their A round were on more than $100k MRR and operating at close to cash flow b/e. In most other cases, I see companies get to anywhere from $10k to $75k MRR on their seed capital. For some companies selling into large enterprises with large 5 or 6 figure ACV deals (for example many security co’s or next-gen infrastructure co’s) I’ve seen several of them go through $1m of funding and have several live POC’s but no real revenue, just the hope of converting an attractive pipeline (which is a huge positive btw).
Controlling for team, product, market and time – until about late 2015, these numbers used to attract Series A investors who would lead rounds of $3-5m. But the majority of these investors have moved up market and now want companies on a minimum of $1-3m ARR with positive sales economics and at least one or two quarters of renewals. This is all-good, and makes a lot of sense for some funds, but what do you do as CEO when you eventually find product/market fit AND an early replicable sales model and need to raise further funding to support your growth.
Welcome to the land of late seed, post seed, pre-A, – wade through the nomenclature and pick your own term for what this is….(I prefer late seed for no reason in particular). What late seed is not, is a bridge round where you need more cash to hit product market fit. Some companies spend all of their pre-seed or seed capital before hitting pmf, and it is typically existing investors who throw good money after bad to continue to fund them, not new investors.