744-Day Runway

👋 Hey, Egemen here.

Founders keep quoting the same figure: the median gap between funding rounds has stretched to 744 days.

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Oh my… The joke is becoming a reality.

744 days should not a real number but it shows up in fundraising reports.

Back in Q4 2024, Carta shared Seed to Series A as 774 days - median number of days for founders.

Somewhere in a chain running from Carta to a virtual assistant company's blog to a startup credits directory, two digits swapped and an eighteen-month-old peak got relabeled as today.

Carta had that same interval at 616 days by Q2 2025.

The typo matters less than the habit behind it, which is treating one national median as a planning input.

PitchBook and NVCA counted $412.7 billion into US startups in the first half of 2026, a record.
And 87.5% of that landed in rounds of $100 million or more.
86% of every venture dollar went to AI.

Carta's Q1 2026 read on Series A tells the same story from the other end: around $300 million median for foundational model companies, $55 million for everyone else.

Seed is where this gets uncomfortable, and it's the part I'd want to know if I were raising this quarter.

Especially relevant for US founders:

Bay Area seed valuations for SaaS hit $33.3 million, another record. New York reached $24.5 million after an 80% jump in twelve months. Across the rest of the country the median sat at $12.7 million and has not moved in a year.

A founder in Denver reads "$24 million median seed," builds a raise and a dilution model around it, and is calibrating against Manhattan.

So the decision logic runs opposite to what the median implies. If you are outside the two hubs in the US, price the round against your own and sector rather than the national figure. Then size it against the Series A metric you actually have to hit instead of the number the median suggests you deserve.

👉 The founders who’ll get hurt over the next eighteen months are the ones who took a hub valuation without hub-level growth underneath it.

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