How much equity to give away at pre-seed and seed: the numbers in 2026

Every founder asks it sooner or later, usually late at night with a spreadsheet open: how much of my company should I sell in this round? There’s no fixed rule. There are numbers, though, and investors know them by heart.

Here are the most recent ones, where they come from and how to use them without boxing yourself in. One warning before we start: the big datasets are American. They’re still a useful reference point wherever you raise, so they’re worth knowing well.

New to all this? Read the beginner’s map first: it goes from zero to a first round. Keep the startup glossary in another tab for the jargon.

Seed: the 20% reference

For years the median at seed was a round 20%. In 2025 it slipped a little. Software companies sold 19% in the first months of the year, and across the 5,118 priced seed rounds Carta had counted by August the figure was 19.5%. Further up the ladder, Series A sits at 18%, Series B at 15% and Series C at 10%.

Hard tech plays by different rules. Biotech founders, for instance, tend to give up 23 to 25% in the early rounds, because so much money goes into research before there’s a product.

The tail tells you as much as the middle. Fewer than 10% of software seed rounds sold 30% or more. So if a term sheet asks for a third of your company at seed, you’re well outside what the market usually prices, and asking why is perfectly reasonable.

Pre-seed: it depends on how much you raise

Pre-seed is messier, because most rounds are SAFEs or convertible notes with no price attached yet. Carta looked at more than 15,000 SAFEs signed before a first priced round, and the pattern is about as simple as it gets: the more you raise, the more you give up.

Amount raised on SAFEs	Median dilution
Under $250K	1.5%
$250K to $499K	5%
$500K to $999K	9%
$1M to $2.4M	15%
$2.5M to $4.9M	21.6%
$5M or more	25%

Even at the same size the spread is wide. Carta’s own example from September 2025: some founders sell 6% of the company for a million dollars, others sell 16%. Selling 30% at pre-seed, on the other hand, sits far above the 2025 median, whatever the round size.

The option pool dilutes you too

The option pool is the slice set aside for future hires. Among US startups on Carta, the median pool at seed is 13 to 14% of the company. Pools tend to start around 10% early on and grow to just under 20% by the later rounds.

Here’s the part that catches founders out. Investors often ask for the pool to be created or topped up before their money arrives, inside the pre-money valuation. When that happens, the existing shareholders pay for it, not the new investor. Read that clause twice.

How to use these numbers

• Start from what you need, not from the percentage. Work out what the money has to achieve before the next round, then look at the dilution that implies.
• Model two rounds ahead. Each round dilutes everything before it: sell 20% at seed and 18% at Series A, and founders keep about 66% of what they owned before the seed, option pool not included.
• Treat ranges as ranges. Sector, traction and the number of investors competing for the deal move the price more than any benchmark.
• Remember where the data comes from. These are US figures. Italy has no public series of the same size, so use them as reference points rather than rules.

If you’re raising in Italy, our guide to raising capital in Italy covers who invests at each stage, and the list of Italian unicorns shows how long the road usually is. Investors’ tax breaks can also change how a round is put together: we compared Italy and the United States here.