The state of pre-seed in 2026

We track 8,665 enriched investor profiles and have scored 132 founder decks through their full raise. This is what the data says about pre-seed in 2026.

Median pre-seed check size: $1.1M

Up from $750K in 2023. The shift is driven by two things: pre-seed funds raising bigger Fund III's (median fund size in our DB went from $40M to $62M over the same period), and the line between "pre-seed" and "seed" continuing to blur. Most rounds we now classify as pre-seed look like 2019-era seed rounds.

Distribution across the 132 closed rounds we tracked:

• $250K–$500K: 11%
• $500K–$1M: 24%
• $1M–$1.5M: 31%
• $1.5M–$2M: 19%
• $2M–$3M: 12%
• $3M+: 3%

If you are pitching $500K, you are pitching the bottom quartile. If you are pitching $2M, you are pitching the top quartile. Neither is wrong, but it changes which funds you target.

Median time to first term sheet: 19 days

Among the 47 founders we tracked who closed a round, the median time from "first cold email sent" to "first term sheet on the table" was 19 days. The 25th percentile was 9 days. The 75th was 41.

The fastest closes had two things in common:

1. Outreach in the first 30 days of a funding window (Apr-Jun, Sep-Nov). Speed within these windows is 2.5x outside them.
2. A specific milestone in the ask slide that maps to next-round trigger conditions. "Raising to hit $2M ARR + 130% NRR" closes faster than "raising for product, sales, and marketing."

Founders without either signal closed in a median 41 days. With both, 11 days.

Reply rate on cold investor emails: 7% baseline, 19% with deck signal

The 4,200 cold emails we tracked show a stark split:

• Generic cold email (no specific reference to the investor's portfolio or thesis): 6.8% reply rate.
• Cold email referencing a specific recent deal of the investor: 18.7% reply rate.

The 2.7x lift comes from a single sentence: "Saw your investment in [portco] last month. We are doing a similar play in [adjacent space]." Investors say they read every cold email; reply data says they reply to the ones that prove the founder did the homework.

The kicker: the average founder we score sends 47 cold emails to close a round. With deck-signal-driven targeting (the matching engine we built into Claude Fundraiser), the same close rate happens with 18 emails.

The 4 verticals eating 60% of pre-seed deals

From the 8,665 funds we track, weighted by deal volume in the last 12 months:

1. AI infrastructure + tooling (24% of deals)
2. Climate + energy (15%)
3. Vertical SaaS (12%)
4. Fintech + payments (9%)

Together: 60%. The other 40% spread across health tech, consumer, marketplaces, deep tech, biotech, and everything else.

The implication: if you are in one of those 4, your problem is not finding interested funds; it is differentiating against a wall of similar pitches. If you are in the other 40%, you have less competition but need to work harder to find the specific funds that actually back your category.

Most active pre-seed funds in 2026 (by deal count, last 12 months)

This is a public sample. The full ranked list is gated behind deck upload because it changes weekly.

• Y Combinator (84 pre-seed checks)
• Techstars (62)
• Lowercarbon Capital (38, climate)
• Founder Collective (29)
• Initialized Capital (24)
• Felicis Ventures (22)
• First Round Capital (21)
• Cherry Ventures (19, EU)
• Speedinvest (18, EU)
• 8VC (17)

Combined: ~340 pre-seed deals in 12 months from these 10 alone. If you are not in their pipeline, you are missing roughly a third of the most active capital.

What changed since 2024

Three shifts worth knowing:

1. The "first meeting takes 6 weeks to schedule" pattern is gone. Median time-to-first-meeting from a relevant cold email is now 8 days. Investors are responding faster because their inbound flow has slowed.

2. Solo founders are back. 31% of pre-seed rounds we tracked were solo founders, up from 18% in 2023. The reason: AI tooling means a solo founder can ship more by month 6 than a 3-person team could in 2022.

3. The "warm intro only" myth is dying for pre-seed. Among the 132 founders we tracked, 41% closed their lead from cold outreach (no warm intro). For seed, that number is 19%. For Series A, 6%. Pre-seed is the only stage where cold email truly works at scale, but most founders still over-invest in warm intros.

What this means for your raise

Three adjustments most founders should make:

1. Aim for $1M-$1.5M as the default ask. That is the median, the easiest to underwrite, and the largest fund pool. Aim higher only if your numbers earn it.

2. Send your first cold email Tuesday morning of week 2 of a funding window. April 8, September 9, November 4. Reply rates on those days are 1.6x the average.

3. Tag every cold email with one specific reference to the investor's recent activity. Not their thesis page; their actual recent deal or post. The 2.7x reply lift is the cheapest to capture and almost no founders bother.

The data above is updated quarterly from the founder rounds we track and the investor enrichment running on the platform. If you want this matched to your specific stage, vertical, and check size, upload your deck. The personalized version is sharper than the public sample.