How to Raise a Series A: The Fundraising Process Founders Run

To raise a Series A, most founders spend a month or more preparing a tight metrics story and data room, line up partner-level meetings at a tiered list of firms within two to three weeks, push the strongest into partner meetings, gather term sheets close together, and then clear confirmatory diligence. Carta's July 2026 benchmarks put the median software Series A at $14.4M.

Definition: The Series A fundraising process is the sequence a founder runs to raise a first large priced round from institutional investors: preparation, outreach, first meetings, partner meetings, term sheets, diligence and closing.

A seed round is often bought on a story. A Series A is usually bought on a record.

This guide is about running the process. If you're still deciding whether your numbers are there, start with when to raise a Series A. For how funds underwrite the deal on their side, see our Series A investor guide.

What a Series A raise looks like in 2026

A few reference points, as context rather than targets:

Round and price. Carta's July 2026 benchmarks, drawn from more than 1,000 software rounds over the prior six months, put the median Series A at $14.4M raised on an $80M post-money valuation, with 18 percent dilution.
A different sample, a different number. Carta's Q2 2025 Series A report, a separate quarterly dataset from its platform, put the median Series A valuation at $47.9M. Same platform, different cut. We'd anchor to the dataset closest to your sector and stage rather than the higher headline.
Time since seed. That same Q2 2025 report found a median of 616 days, just over 20 months, between seed and Series A.
Terms. Cooley's Q2 2026 report, covering 166 venture financings the firm handled across stages, found 95.8 percent of deals carried a 1x liquidation preference and 96.4 percent used non-participating preferred.

The active part of the raise can be short. CRV's 2026 Series A guide notes that the formal process can wrap in a few weeks once a team is genuinely ready, while getting ready often takes a year or two after the seed.

Phase 1: Prepare before the clock starts

Most of a Series A is decided before the first meeting. First Round's Josh Kopelman, in a 2015 essay, suggested at least four weeks of preparation before starting the process. We think that's a reasonable minimum.

What the prep covers:

The argument. YC's Series A pitch guide (by Janelle Tam, YC's Series A Program Manager) has founders write the narrative as 10 to 15 bullet points, each backed by data, and build one slide per point. We like the discipline: if a claim has no number under it, it probably isn't ready for a partner.
The numbers. Monthly revenue, growth, retention by cohort, gross margin, CAC payback and burn. The same guide warns against cumulative charts, which can read like a way to hide a weak month.
The memo. Writing the partner's memo for them can sharpen everything else. Our guide to a founder-written Series A investment memo has a template.
The data room. YC's Series A diligence checklist (Aaron Harris and Jason Kwon) says having documents in one place before a term sheet can cut as much as a week off closing. Our data room checklist covers what to include by stage.
The cap table. Clean up SAFEs, options and any promised equity grants. YC's checklist flags granting pending equity before the process, since a term sheet may make your current 409A valuation harder to rely on.
Practice. Run full mock pitches with founders who raised a Series A recently.

Phase 2: Build the Series A investor list and sequence the firms

At Series A you're not pitching firms. You're pitching partners.

Elad Gil, in a 2011 post on Series A tactics, observed that the first partner you talk to at a fund often "owns" the deal internally. So research which partner leads deals like yours, who sits on boards of comparable companies, and who has written about your market.

A workable structure:

Tier 1 (8 to 12 partners): firms you'd most want as lead, with a named partner each.
Tier 2 (10 to 15): strong leads that are a slightly weaker fit.
Tier 3 (5 to 10): firms you'd take money from but would use partly to sharpen the pitch.

Gil suggests practicing on firms lower on your list first. Kopelman adds a warning about the other direction: take too many meetings over too long, and you risk becoming a "shopped deal" whose reputation travels ahead of it.

Lean on existing investors. Your seed lead can make introductions, take reference calls and tell you honestly how you'll be received. For the warm-up work months before a raise, see our guide on networking with VCs.

If you're managing 30 or more partner relationships, a tracker helps. 1752 Fundraising includes a pipeline CRM to track investor conversations, plus deck hosting with view tracking and a data room, so the materials and the stages live together.

Phase 3: First meetings that lead with the record

YC's Series A guide suggests a pitch of 15 to 20 minutes that sets up a 40 to 45 minute discussion. That ratio is the point. If partners aren't asking questions, the guide treats that as a warning sign that the slides are too hard to follow.

What tends to work in a first Series A meeting:

Open with traction. Put one headline number up front so the partner decides early that the meeting is worth their attention.
Show trends, not snapshots. YC suggests at least four to six months of a trend for it to be believable.
Pick your "hero facts." Two or three numbers you want the partner to repeat to colleagues.
Explain why money is the constraint. The ask works best when it's clear the obstacle is capital, not product or fit.

Kopelman's essay makes a related point: founders tend to do better when they can show command of cohorts, LTV and CAC in conversation rather than only on slides. Our guide to questions VCs ask in a pitch meeting covers the likely follow-ups.

Phase 4: The partner meeting

A partner meeting is when your champion brings you to the wider partnership, or the decision group, for a vote or a decision. At many firms it's the gate between interest and a term sheet.

How to prepare:

Ask your champion what the partnership will worry about. They usually know the objections that will come up, and they want you to win the room as much as you do.
Update the deck for this audience. Move the answers to those objections into the main story, not the appendix.
Bring the full team you'd want backed. If a co-founder owns the product or the numbers, they should be there.
Expect a different energy. Several partners who haven't met you will test the weakest part of the case.

Ask, kindly but directly, when and how the firm decides. Some decide the same day. Others need a second meeting.

Phase 5: Term sheets and choosing a lead

Timing matters most here. Gil suggests trying to have term sheets land within days of each other, so you're comparing real offers instead of choosing between one offer and a hope. He also suggests not disclosing which other firms you're meeting until terms are signed, because investors talk.

When you compare offers, look past the headline price:

Partner fit. Who joins your board, and have you talked to founders they've backed, including ones whose companies struggled?
Board composition and control.
Liquidation preference and participation. Cooley's data shows 1x non-participating is the market norm.
Option pool size and whether it's in the pre-money.
Pro rata and other investor rights.

Our term sheet guide for founders walks through each term, and our guide to the lead investor role explains why the lead sets the price and most of the terms.

Phase 6: Confirmatory diligence and closing

Signing a term sheet isn't the finish line. In the survey of 885 VCs at 681 firms by Gompers, Gornall, Kaplan and Strebulaev (NBER working paper 22587, 2016), the average deal took 83 days to close, with about 118 hours of diligence and 10 reference calls. YC's diligence checklist notes that closing a Series A can take more than a month, much of it spent tracking down documents for lawyers.

Keep the company running. Keep updating investors. A quarter of drift during closing is a strange thing to explain to the people who just priced your growth.

A worked example: a six-week Series A process

The numbers are illustrative. A B2B software company at $3.2M ARR, about 20 months after its seed, plans to raise $14M.

Weeks -6 to -1: prep. Metrics pack, memo, data room, six practice pitches, list of 30 partners in three tiers.
Weeks 1 to 2: 25 first meetings, Tier 3 first and Tier 1 in week two.
Week 3: 9 second meetings (36 percent of first meetings). Two objections recur: expansion revenue and sales hiring. The team adds a cohort expansion chart and a hiring plan.
Week 4: 4 partner meetings.
Week 5: 2 term sheets, three days apart. One offers $14M on a $70M pre-money ($84M post, about 16.7 percent dilution). The other offers $14M on a $66M pre-money ($80M post, 17.5 percent) with a partner the founders preferred after reference calls.
Weeks 6 to 12: confirmatory diligence, legal documents, close.

They take the second term sheet. A point of dilution is real, but in our view the partner on your board for the next five or more years is usually worth more.

Four partner meetings from 25 first meetings (16 percent) isn't a benchmark. It's one plausible path. Our sibling guides on how many investors to pitch and how long a round takes cover the funnel and timeline math.

How to raise a Series A: a process checklist

[ ] Metrics clear the bar for your sector (see the timing guide)
[ ] 10 to 15 claims written, each with data underneath
[ ] Monthly charts with 4 to 6+ months of trend; no cumulative charts
[ ] Founder memo, deck, appendix of likely questions
[ ] Data room built from a Series A diligence checklist
[ ] Pending equity grants issued; cap table reconciled
[ ] 25 to 40 partners named, tiered, with intro paths
[ ] Seed investors briefed and ready for reference calls
[ ] First meetings compressed into 2 to 3 weeks
[ ] Champion asked about partnership objections before each partner meeting
[ ] Term sheets compared on partner, board, preference, pool, rights
[ ] Weekly updates to investors during diligence and closing

For the closing stretch and the months after it, 1752 Fundraising can also draft investor updates from your real numbers (connect Stripe, banking and dashboards) and track opens and replies.

"Why not just wait for a preemptive offer?"

It's tempting. Preemptive term sheets do happen, and a strong company can sometimes skip the process entirely. Taking a few "no agenda" coffee meetings feels like a costless way to see who bites.

But.

Arianna Simpson of a16z crypto argued in September 2025 that the "not-raising raise" may work at pre-seed or seed but that preemptive rounds mostly aren't happening after the Series A, and that founders tend to do better with a real process: a timeline, a polished deck and deliberate outreach to the firms they want. Her shortest test is a good one: you know you're being preempted when there's a term sheet in your inbox. In our view, warm-up meetings are useful for relationships, but they aren't a raise.

Where investors disagree

Two real splits are worth knowing about.

Long preparation, or compressed process? CRV's guide frames getting ready as a year or two of work after the seed, and Kopelman's essay warns that casual VC interest can tempt founders to pitch before they're ready. Gil's tactics focus on the compressed window itself. Both fit together if you separate them: a long stretch of building the metrics story with no ask, then a short, scheduled process.

How much to share about the competition. Gil favors keeping other firms' names private until terms are signed. Other founders find that a light, honest signal of momentum ("we expect to make a decision in the next two weeks") speeds things up. We'd share timing freely and names sparingly.

Common mistakes when raising a Series A

Raising on the calendar, not the metrics. Kopelman flagged the risk of raising too early back in 2015, and it still applies.
Pitching firms instead of partners. The wrong partner can own your deal at the right firm.
Drip-feeding meetings. Spread over months, a process starts to look shopped.
Hiding weak months. Cumulative charts and blended metrics tend to raise more questions than they answer.
Choosing on price alone. The board seat lasts longer than the valuation headline.
Letting the business slip during closing. Diligence can take weeks, and the numbers keep moving.

Where we land

Our approach: be ready before you start, pitch named partners rather than logos, compress first meetings into two to three weeks, treat each partner meeting as its own project, and pick the partner as carefully as the price. Then keep running the company while lawyers do their part.

Others will run it differently, and a company with exceptional growth may never need a formal process at all. It's our answer, not the answer.

The bottom line

A Series A process rewards preparation more than charisma. Most of the outcome is set by the numbers and the list before the first call.

The seed was a bet on what you could build.

The Series A is a price on what you've already built.

Key takeaways

Carta's July 2026 benchmarks put the median software Series A at $14.4M on an $80M post-money valuation, with 18 percent dilution; other datasets show lower medians.
Many founders spend at least four weeks preparing a claims-and-evidence narrative, metrics pack and data room before the first meeting.
At Series A, the partner you pitch often owns the deal, so a tiered list of named partners tends to work better than a list of firms.
Compressing first meetings, preparing each partner meeting with your champion, and landing term sheets close together usually strengthens your position.
Diligence and closing can take a month or more after the term sheet; the Gompers survey found an average of 83 days to close.

Frequently asked questions

What happens in a Series A partner meeting?

In a partner meeting, your champion at the firm brings you to the wider partnership or decision group, often for an hour, to pitch and answer harder questions. Partners who haven't met you usually probe the weakest part of the case. Some firms decide that day; others hold a second meeting. Asking your champion about likely objections beforehand often helps.

How many VCs should you pitch for a Series A?

Many founders build a list of roughly 25 to 40 named partners across three tiers, aiming to land at least two term sheets. The right number depends on your metrics, sector and how many firms lead rounds like yours. A strong company may need fewer; a borderline one usually needs a wider list and a sharper story.

How long does Series A due diligence take?

It varies, but the survey of 885 VCs by Gompers, Gornall, Kaplan and Strebulaev found an average of 83 days to close a deal, with about 118 hours of diligence and 10 reference calls. YC's Series A checklist notes closing can take more than a month after the term sheet, so having a data room ready can save time.

Should you tell VCs who else you are talking to?

Opinions differ. Elad Gil has argued for keeping other firms' names private until terms are signed, because investors talk to each other. Many founders share timing and momentum honestly without naming firms. Naming investors who haven't committed, or implying interest that doesn't exist, tends to backfire once partners compare notes.

What should a Series A pitch deck include?

YC's Series A guide suggests a title, an early traction teaser, problem, solution, detailed traction with trends, market, competition, vision, team and use of funds, plus an appendix of likely questions. With one slide per claim, that often means 10 to 15 main slides. Each slide works best with one claim, supported by data, and clear charts rather than cumulative totals.

Sources

Disclaimer: This guide is for general education only and is not legal, tax or investment advice. Laws, market data and program terms change, so it may not reflect the latest developments or fit your situation. Treat it as a starting point, not a source of truth, and talk to a qualified lawyer, accountant or financial adviser before you make decisions.