Remember that it's best to explicitly define what the fundraising milestone strategy is during the seed stage.
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Once a startup has raised seed capital, plenty of theories and advice exist on how to successfully raise a Series A. Recently, we looked at our own portfolio at NextView Ventures to dig a little deeper on how startups actually raise that next round of financing.
It's been four years since we founded NextView Ventures, so we're now at a critical mass of startups that have accomplished this Series A milestone. Of the NextView-backed founders that have tried to raise this round, over 70% have done so (compared to a mean success rate in the industry of around 27%, according to some sources). Given this volume, we can now draw several insights from which others might learn.
Our hope is that, in being transparent around the factors leading to successful Series A raises, everyone involved can be more effective at helping a given startup reach this critical financing stage.
While several assumptions heading into this analysis wound up being validated, we were surprised by a few different findings. Regardless of our hypotheses, some of the lessons we uncovered in examining the companies in our portfolio which have successfully raised a Series A include the following:
