Fundraising is known to be daunting and demanding taking away the attention of especially the CEO from the day to day running of the startup. That is why it is important for one to know exactly how long the process takes before they embark on it.
From Digest Africa deals data, we ran an analysis on deals at the different stages and identified how long it actually takes to raise funding. The analysis was carried out on deals at four different funding stages: Pre-seed (n=63), Seed (n=477), Series A (n=115), Series B (n=36), Series C (n=13).
Generally, startups take between 180 days to 527 days to raise a funding round. Specifically, at the Pre-seed stage, the time we considered was from when the startup was founded up-to when it closed its pre-seed round. The number of days is 180 which is 6 months. We consider deals that are purely angel, very first or from accelerators as pre-seed. The average pre-seed round size is nearly $80,0000 while the median is $32,000.
Starting from Seed, the time more than doubles. On average, Seed rounds take 414 days from when a startup closes its pre-seed which is nearly 1 year and 2 months. The average seed round is $450,000 while the median round size is $150,000. This is more than twice.
On the other hand, Series As take on average 455 days to close. This is an extra 41 days or a month and 10 days. Series A rounds have a mean of nearly $7 million which is more than twice the median at $3 million.
The time continues to go upwards for Series B at 597 days before dropping to 527 days for Series C. Like all rounds, the average for Series B and C at $21 million and $61 million is also twice the medians of $12 million $32.5 million respectively.