What 60+ 2025 Funding Deals Tell Us About Early-Stage Dynamics
At Startup IQ we reviewed over sixty 2025 pre-seed and seed funding deals across AI, fintech, crypto, consumer and healthcare. We didn’t just catalog them, we ran them through a set of custom-based models designed to capture how early traction (MQLs, LOIs, ARR) and investor interest interact in nonlinear ways.
The idea was simple: could we explain why some founders landed Seed VC rounds, why others routed to Angels, and why timing seemed to matter more than anyone wanted to admit?
After running the numbers, three clear conclusions emerged.
1. Pre-seed deals focus on Angels
For small checks—sub-$1M, often in smaller markets the model routed overwhelmingly toward Angels, unless there was unusually strong ARR evidence.
This matched the data: the Angels-led deals we tracked were concentrated in geographies like Europe and Latam, with check sizes under $1M.
Conclusion: if you’re raising a small pre-seed round, don’t waste cycles pitching Seed VCs unless you can show revenue. Angels are the natural path at this stage.
2. Seed VCs care most about pilot conversion
Round after round, the strongest predictor of a Seed VC term sheet was turning Letter of Intent (LOI)s into actual Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR). Small changes in conversion made a big difference.
In our sample, the median Seed round in 2025 was about $5.9M (Crunchbase Q2’25). Startups that could show even modest ARR from pilots, saw their modeled probability of a Seed VC term sheet rise several points.
By contrast, raw Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) or “big waitlists” alone had less impact on the model.
Conclusion: if you’re aiming for Seed checks ≥ $5M, your highest-leverage move is getting even a handful of customers out of your pilots and into paying customers.
3. Late-summer fundraising is volatile
The model also highlighted something many founders feel intuitively: August–September fundraising is active and the data shows that August 2025 was the slowest funding month since 2017 (Crunchbase News).
In practice, this means founders converting a pilot in July had more stable outcomes than those announcing in September.
Conclusion: timing matters. If you’re close to turning pilots to revenue, do it before the late-summer lull to avoid getting stuck in the noise.
Why it matters
Studying these 60+ deals confirmed what many of us have experienced: early-stage fundraising isn’t linear. It’s a system with attractors, thresholds, and periods of instability.
For Pre-seed: recognize the Angel attractor and lean into it unless you’re an have ARR.
For Seed rounds: focus on LOI→ARR conversion—it’s the lever Seed VCs respond to.
For timing: don’t underestimate seasonality; hitting your milestones before the late-summer dip can change outcomes.
Fundraising may feel chaotic. But by treating it as a dynamic system, we can map where small actions create outsized effects—and help founders make better, faster moves.
