We pulled 900 seed deals closed in the first half of 2026 and the shape of the market has shifted more than the headline numbers suggest.
The topline numbers
- Median seed round: $3.1M, up from $2.4M a year ago.
- Deal count: down 22% year over year.
- Time from first meeting to term sheet: up from 19 days to 34 days.
Bigger checks, fewer of them, slower to close. That combination tells you where the bar moved.
What's being asked for at first meeting
Founders we talked to described a consistent pattern shift:
- Retention data before traction slides. Investors want week-4 and week-12 retention curves, not just signup counts.
- A margin story, not just a growth story. "What does this cost to serve at 10x" is now a first-meeting question, not a diligence question.
- Proof the team can ship without the founder in the loop. Solo-founder velocity stories land worse than they did two years ago.
One partner put it bluntly: "We used to fund a wedge and a team. Now we want to see the wedge already cutting."
Who's still raising easily
Two categories are still moving fast: infra tooling with usage-based pricing already live, and vertical AI products with a measurable time-to-value under a week. Everything else is getting the 34-day treatment.
The 22% who didn't get funded
It's worth naming what's getting filtered out: pre-revenue consumer social, horizontal AI wrappers without a data moat, and anything pitched primarily on TAM slides. None of that is new advice — it's just being enforced harder than it was in 2024.
If you're raising in the next two quarters, budget for the 34-day number, not the 19-day one, and bring the retention curve to the first call.