Top 10 largest Seed and Series A rounds
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A clear divide has emerged in early-stage fundraising, creating two distinct paths for founders:
- The Traditional Path: Where the average seed round still hovers around a healthy $4M.
- The AI “Mega-Round”: Where a new class of founder is raising $10M, $20M, or more, often before a product is even in market.
The key differentiator is clear: these mega-rounds are going almost exclusively to AI-native companies.
In this edition, we pulled the 10 largest Seed and Series A rounds and their fundraising timelines to understand this new reality.
Is this a permanent, two-track system, or a temporary gold rush fueled by the novelty of AI?
That is the golden question on every founder’s and investor’s mind.
What a “normal” round looks like
The mega-rounds happening are insane. But before we get into them, let’s level-set on the numbers so we have a real baseline for comparison.
The Seed Stage:
For most startups on the Traditional Path, the median seed round is between $3M and $3.6M. The goal of this capital is typically to find initial PMF over an 18-24 month runway. In contrast, the AI Fast Track operates on a different scale, with Seed rounds ranging from $6M to over $100M, driven by technical moats and founder pedigree rather than revenue.
The Series A Stage:
At the Series A, the divide becomes more tied to business metrics. For a company on the Traditional Path, the median round is between $10M and $12M, typically requiring $1M to $2M in ARR. The AI Fast Track sees rounds from $20M to over $200M based on user growth and foundational tech.
10 largest Seed rounds
The term “Seed round” has lost its traditional meaning for a certain type of company though. Rounds of $50M, $100M, and even $200M are historically the size of a healthy Series B or C.
The startups raising these mega rounds are building complex, defensible infrastructure. The “fast track” is primarily for two overlapping categories:
- AI/ML Platforms: e.g. Vianai, WaveForms AI, Froxt.
- Developer & Enterprise Infrastructure: e.g. DevRev, Descope, Antithesis, ngena.
Investors are willing to write massive, early-stage checks for companies tackling foundational problems for technical buyers. While the technical risk is high, the market opportunity for a company that becomes the new standard in cloud ops, developer productivity, or enterprise AI is enormous.
10 largest Series A rounds
When we look at this data, two core insights are visible:
1. The ‘AI Fast Track’ is real and happening now.
Of the top 10 largest Series A rounds of all time, the two most recent are from this year. This shows how AI-native companies are operating on a different fundraising track, raising historically significant capital at an unprecedented pace.
2. The criteria for a mega-round has changed.
Historically, raising a round of this magnitude required dominating a massive, well-understood market like cloud infra (Pivotal) or compliance (OneTrust). Today, investors are writing these checks for foundational AI shifts and the product-led GTM models that power them. The focus has shifted from proven business models to disruptive technology.
While these mega rounds only apply to a subset of companies, with the vast majority of companies falling into a traditional model, it’s a pattern that we and other investors are keeping our eyes on.
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