🪎 Nobody new is raising a fund

👋 Hey, Egemen here.

Seed prices hit records this month and dilution fell again. Underneath both numbers, the count of firms able to write your first check is shrinking.

Here’s a snapshot of what’s on the menu today:

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Peter Walker published fundraising benchmarks on 10 July covering more than 1,000 software rounds closed in the previous six months:

Read those in isolation and founders look like they finally have leverage.

Early-stage valuations sit at record highs while the count of rounds actually getting completed keeps falling.

In every previous boom, deal count climbed alongside prices. This cycle runs the other way.

PitchBook's Q2 Venture Monitor, out 9 July, shows the mechanism. Megadeals of $100M or more absorbed 87.5% of the $412.7B deployed in H1 2026. AI took 86% of every venture dollar.

Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive Capital and Founders Fund between them collected 48.1% of all capital LPs committed to venture.

First-time fund formation is tracking its lowest year since 2016.

(Source: Carta, "VC Startup Fundraising Benchmarks From 1000 Rounds", 10 July 2026. Software companies only.)

That first-time fund line is the one I keep going back to.

New managers write first checks into founders nobody has heard of yet. That is the entire job of an emerging fund. Andreessen Horowitz is not leading your $1.5M pre-seed, and Thrive is not going to read your deck.

When first-time funds stop forming, the layer of the market that backs people without logos thins out every quarter, and founders feel it long before any headline number admits it.

Which changes how I read that falling dilution figure. It describes the companies that closed. Founders who ran a process and got nothing never enter the calculation at all.

A market can post its best median terms on record in the same quarter it turns down more founders than it did last year.

We are preparing for a perfect storm and a massive crash in early stage funding if thigns continue in this trajectory.

👉 If you’re rasing now, confirm every firm on it is deploying from a fund raised in the last 24 months. Anything older should go to the bottom, and you spend that week finding a VC that can still say yes.

Ten minutes of filing history tells you whether a firm can actually write you a check. Most founders skip it and lose six weeks.

Most founders research the partner. Track record, board seats, portfolio fit, what they post about. Almost nobody checks whether the fund behind that partner still has money to put to work.

Step 1: Pull the firm's Form D filings on SEC EDGAR Search the firm name, filter to Form D.

Every fund vehicle files one when it starts raising, and you get the fund name, the vintage year and the target size for free.

Step 2: Count new investments on Crunchbase

Pull the firm's recent activity and count new portfolio companies added in the last six months. Ignore follow-ons into companies already on the list.

Step 3: Apply the rule

Two signals together tell you the firm has stopped opening new positions, whatever the website says.

Step 4: Ask on the first call

Partners answer this without flinching. It signals you understand how their business works, and it saves you six weeks of meetings that were never going to close.

👉 Say this, word for word: "Which fund are you investing out of, what vintage is it, and how many new positions are left in it?"

Cap table management doesn’t have to be frustrating. From issuing grants to 409A valuations or ASC 718 reporting Pulley can make it simple. 

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Check our storefront here:

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