What VC Data Says About Raising Your Next Round

The venture market split into this week, and the number most people will quote is hiding it. I wasn't planning to make a video about this week's report. I finished the number late on Friday, looked at the chart, and thought founders are going to read the headline and make exactly the wrong in their race. So here is the full. Story. The average venture round in the U.S. mid-market this week was about $38.5 million, up about 1% on last week. Stable, healthy, nothing to see here. But now here is the version you won't see in the headlines. The typical round, the one right in the middle of the pack, dropped from $38. Million to 26 million. That's a third of the round gone in one week. How can both be true at the same time? Five very large rounds held the average up, and every one of those five had one thing in common: it has nothing to do with the pitch deck. It stays with me because then I think in the most useful fundraising lesson I've seen in months, I'm gonna share with you. And here is the other one that surprised me. The best deal of the week was a $22 million round. It beat an $85 million round by 17 points in my scoring. So if you are setting your number based on what the biggest round raised, you are steering by the wrong star. If we haven't met, I am Leon Eisen. I am a 4-time founder and a venture capitalist. I also have a PhD in physics. Which mostly means I don't trust a number until I checked it at least twice. I built a medical device company called Oxytone, and we developed the first FDA-cleared wrist-worn medical monitor. Keep that in mind because regulators play a big part in today's story. These days, I am a venture partner at Network VC, and I wrote bestselling book Invisible Game: The Secrets of the Turnsheet Magnet. This methodology helps founders become fundable and improve investors' conversion. Every week I publish a report on the part of the market that actually prices your round. Not the billion-dollar AI rounds. Those are a different sport. I track US rounds between $5 and $100 million. Like, subscribe to my channel. And add your comments. Welcome. This week, that was 18 verified rounds, $661 million in total. Verified matters, and here is why. Every deal in report is checked against the least 2 independent sources, and when you actually do that, you find surprises. Several deals circulating in this week. funding roundups weren't this week newer at all. One was announced a week before and simply recirculated. One $8 million round had already been reported back in July 2025. One company headline number was its total funding today, not the new round. And a couple of deals were 2 separate rounds glued together into one headline, With no split between them. I threw all of those out. If you build your view on the market from daily funding newsletter, you are partly reading last month's market. Then every verified deal gets a score—the Eisen Fundability Score—from zero to one hundred. What is it? Simple version: it asks five questions about the deal. The first: Who backed you? And did anyone come back? What have outsiders already confirmed about you? The 3, how clear and strong is your story? And 4th, is the deal well built? And 5th, does this round fit your capital plan? And here is what it does not do. It never scores anything a company says about itself. No revenue claims, no growth rate, no we tripled. Only what something outside the company can check. Quick one before we dive in. The full written report, the scorecard for all 18 deals, and the 5 playbooks are linked in the description. If you want to every week, the newsletter link is there too. Today I am going to break down 3 things for you. The first thing is why the market split and what that means for the number you ask for. The second. The 3 things that separated the winners from everybody else. And the 5th, playbook, that you actually do on Monday morning. Today. Let's start with what average. Imagine you are in the room with 9 people of normal height. A basketball team walks in. The average height in the room jumps. Did anyone else get taller? No. The average just stopped describing the room. That's what happened this week. So compare it with last week on the same range of deal sizes. Total capital fell 22%. The number of deals fell again 22%. The average check went up 1%. The median check, the typical round, fell from $32 million, from $38 million to $26 million. Why did this average hold? 5 rounds of $55 million or more took 56% of the capital. So Go.AI at $85 million, Emma at $75 million, Backhead Biosciences at $75 million, Confido at $55 million. The other 12 rounds cleared at median of $25 million. Now here's the part I promised you. All five of those big rounds had investors from the previous rounds coming back. Every single one. Of the twelve rounds below that line, only three did. Think about what that means for the investor side. A partner writing a seventy-five million dollar check this week was not paying for the great pitch. They were paying for the decision made by someone. Someone who already knew the company from the inside. The previous investor saying, I'm in again and I'm in bigger. Everyone without that decision got priced on the median. The founder mistake. You read average round $38 million and you anchor, you ask there. But that average is the 5 companies those insiders reinvested. If you don't have that, Your harmless comparable is $25 million. Open at $38 without it and you will spend the first month of your process getting repriced. The fix is simple. Write down 2 numbers before you open your round. First number, what you can defend if your current lead investor reinvests at their full share or more. And second, what you can defend if nobody on your cap table writes again. If you don't have the insider commitment in writing, the second number is your number. Now let's talk about the best deal of the week because it's not the biggest one, not even close. Teal Health based in San Francisco raised $22 million Series A led by .406 Ventures. Teal makes the Teal Wand, a device that lets women do cervical cancer screening at home instead of in a doctor's office. It scored 77 out of 100 in Eisen's score, the highest score since we started using the current scoring system. Why? Because almost everything important about this company has already been confirmed by someone else. The FDA cleared the device in 2025. 5 major insurance accepted Aetna, Cigna, Blue Cross Blue Shield, UnitedHealth, and more. The clinical evidence went through peer review. Broad insurance coverage of this kind of self-collected screening begins, begins in January '27, and that date is set by the government, not by Teal. Count how many outside parties did work before any investor opened the data room. Regulator, 5 insurance, peer reviews, federal coverage date. The investor's job was reduced to checking facts. I'll tell you from personal experience. I have taken a medical device through FDA clearance. It's slow, it's painful, it costs a fortune. And that's exactly why it's valuable. Nobody can fake it, and nobody can talk their way around it. The second best deal tells the same story. Big Hat Bioscience, a $75 million Series C, scored 74. Their lead drug is already in clinical trials with patients being dosed, and the venture arms of Amgen, Eli Lilly, and Merck Merck are returning investors. Now compare that with the biggest round of the week. Go.ai raised for $85 million Series A, 17 times the size of seed round from 10 months earlier. It holds SOC 2 Type 2 and ISO certifications. Those are real audited certifications and they matter when you sell to banks. It scored 60. Wow. Why? Not one customer's name in the source we reviewed. Here's the lesson. SOC 2 proves your controls work. It doesn't prove your product works. And it doesn't prove anybody buys it. When you line up the week's deal by type of outside approval, you get a very clear ranking. Type of approval, what it confirms core, FDA clearance, clinical trial, the product itself is 77 or 74 in score. Agreements, settlement programs, buying relationships, your internal process, just 60 on the biggest round across the 5 rounds. And everything else is average 53.6. So you ask, but Leon, I am not in healthcare. Doesn't matter. An outside approval is anything a third party controls and can confirm without calling you: a government contract, a state pilot program, a standards listing, regulatory clearance, a published independent benchmark. Healthcare just happens to have a lot of them. And now the big one. Remember what all 5 of the largest rounds had in common? Returning investors. 8 of 18 rounds this week had at least one investor from the previous round coming back. Those 8 averaged 63. And the 10 without one averaged 51. That's a gap of almost 12 points in our score. And we checked something important. The scoring system gives a small amount of credit for returning investors directly, at most 2 points. So we removed that part and measured it again. The gap barely moved, still over 10 points. That means rounds with returning investors scored higher on everything else too. Founder quality, who else joined, how deal was built. One fact is driving all of it. And here why this signal is powerful. A new investor sees your company from the outside. Your existing investor has sat on your board for a year or two. They have seen your monthly numbers. They have watched you miss a plan and recover. They know how you behave when a key hire quits. When that person invests again and invests more, they're paying for information no new investor can get in 6 weeks of due diligence. Look at Tema, the $77 million Series B. Every major existing investor increased its investment. The company also confirmed the whole round was new money. No shares sold by insiders on the way out. That combination tells a new investor that nobody took money off the table while the insiders added more. Confido raised $55 million with the same 2 investors backing them for the 3rd round in a row. The founder mistake is here. You think going to your existing investors first looks weak, So you run the process with new investors, and when it stalls, you go back to insiders to fill the gap. The data says the opposite. A new lead investor looks at your round and asks one question: what did the people who know this company best decide to do? If the answer is they are not in, there is no good follow-up, believe me. And the lowest score of the week 43 went to a round. Those announcements mentioned the seed investors' early backing, but that investors wasn't in the new round. I am not saying anything bad about this company. I'm saying a new investor reads that sentence and had a question with no easy answer. It gets sharper at Series B. And this week there were four Series B rounds. The average check was fifty-six million dollars, up to thirty percent on last week. All four had a returning investor, and over the last two weeks, ten out of eleven Series B rounds did. So here's a new rule for this market: no insiders, no Series B. Now to me. This week data breaks, and I love this part. Myth number 1: Raise fast while you have momentum. We checked the 5 rounds where a company raised again within 18 months at a bigger size. Those rounds averaged 56 in score. Everyone else averaged 56 in score as well. Speed alone was worth basically nothing. Slightly less than nothing, actually. To be fair, this is one week and 18 deals. I am not telling you raising fast is bad. I am telling you speed is not a signal of its own. Investors didn't reward how fast you came back. They rewarded how came back with you. Myth number 2: Stealth builds mystery. 4 companies this week came out of stealth or raised their first institutional round. The average 80, 48. Everyone else averaged 59. And here is a clean comparison. Prime Minute came out of stealth with $15 million led by Eclipse. Its launch announcement named a field evaluation with the state of Colorado. Score 53. Corridor came out with $25 billion led by Brain Capital Ventures. A strong lead. But there was no customer, partner, or pilot named in the record. Score 44. That's 9 points for one named partner. First round also got smaller. Seed and pre-seed rounds above $10 million dropped from 5 last week to 3, and the average check fell from $37 to $22 million. And the market is still funding new companies. Its top paying premium prices for them. And the biggest gap of the week— named customers. 7 rounds named real customers, companies a partner could actually call. Those 7 averaged 65. The rest averaged 51. That's over 14 points, the widest gap in the whole report. Tribelo raised just $18 million. It named Meta, Uber, and Merck. as customers, and it scored a 6 to 1. That beat a $30 million round with no named customers by 15 points. One quick note, because I care about this, I am not telling you publish your revenue or your metrics. That's a competitive decision with real downside. I'm talking about customers who have agreed to be named. That's a very different thing. Okay, enough diagnosis. Here, what you actually do: 5 playbooks, each with something concrete you can produce this week. And playbook 1: lead with a date someone else set. TIL didn't say the market is coming. It said in the Fed coverage start January 27th. That date belongs to the government, not to TIL. Your job: write one sentence under 30 words that states your category, the dated event that opens or widens your market, and who set that date. It might be a regulation, a compliance deadline, a standard taking effect, or your buyer budget cycle. Then time your round to close 3 to 6 months before that date. Test it on someone outside of your industry. If they cannot repeat the date, back to you, rewrite it. Playbook 2. Get an approval of your product, not just your process. Take one page and make 3 columns. Product approvals, clearances, certifications, registered trials, independent benchmark, or buyer approvals, government contracts, payer agreements, named pilots, signed Something. And process approval, SOC 2, ISO compliance. Mark what you have. Then pick the fastest missing item in column 1 or column 2 and put a start date and an owner of this quarter. Some of these take months, which is exactly why you start now and not when you open your round. Column 3 is table stakes. It's not your story. Playbook 3. Score yourself against this week market. Score your own round across the 5 questions I mentioned earlier. Then use these week ranges. Above 65, you are in the top 2 of 18. A round-the-tie competitive process with a deadline. Between 55 and 64, you are in the crowded middle. You will be priced near that $25 million median unless you fix your weakest area first. And below 55, the problem is structural. Usually no returning investor. Outside approval is absent. So not amount of pitch practice fixes that. Do a 4 to 8 week repair sprint first. The point isn't to feel good or bad. The point is to decide. Raise now or fix first. Playbook 4: Get a bigger insider commitment in writing before you offer. 4 weeks before you plan to open your round, go to every lead investor from your last 2 rounds and ask 3 questions. Will you take at least your full share of this round? Will you take more than your full share? Would you lead if nobody else does? Get the answer in writing. Not very supportive in number why you are in need. Do 2 quick checks. Make sure the amount you will announce matches your regulatory filing and it doesn't prepare one sentence explaining why. 2 companies this week had filing showing more than their announced number. Diligence teams will notice. If a previous lead is not investing this time, don't list them as a backer of this round in your announcement. Playbook 5: Make every claim in your announcement owned by someone else. Before your next announcement, list every claim you want to make. Next to each one, write the name of the outside party who stands behind it. A customer who agreed to be named, an agency in your pilot, an existing investor willing to explain why they invested again. Any claim with no owner— cut it or replace it. Start now because getting customer approval to be named usually takes 1 or 2 weeks of legal review. Then build a 14-day follow-up plan for your investor process. Where every touchpoint delivers one new checkable fact from that list. Not very exciting about our momentum. A new fact someone else put their name on. And quickly, what I am watching next. First, a bit of accountability. Last week I said the market would keep funding both first-round and Series B rounds. And I named 4 or more Series B rounds as the level to watch. Half right. Series B held at exactly 4, but first round got thinner from 5 down to 3. Here's what I am watching now. Does the split hold? If the typical round stays below $30 million while the average stays above $35 million for a second week, this isn't a one-week blip. It's how the market works right now, and every pricing conversation should start from the median. And second, does any Series B clear without a returning investor? If one scores about 55, the rule is loosening. If none do, no insider, no Series B. And 3, do healthcare rounds keep timing themselves to dates? Those are Healthcare deals this week tied their timing to a fixed calendar event, a coverage start on enrollment season. Close before the date, not after it. So, 4 things to do on Monday this week. Write your 2 numbers, the round you can defend with the written insider commitment and the round you can defend without it. Use the second until the first is on paper. Build your 3-column approval list product, buyer and process, and start the fastest missing product and buyer approval. And 3, ask 3 customers if they can name them, you can name them in your next announcement. And send legal review requests today. And 4, check your announcement against your filing and make sure Every investor you lead in your list is actually in this round. Now, I'm not a financial advisor, and this isn't investment advice. The Eisen Fundability Score is analytical tool, not a recommendation. Come to your own conclusions. But here's what this week showed me. The founders didn't pitch better. They made it easy for investors to say yes. Because someone else has already said it first— a regulator, a customer, or the investor who backed them last time. The full report, all 18 deals scored and all 5 playbooks, is linked below. If this was useful, share it with a founder who is about to raise. Every few people are reading this market correctly right now win. Like, subscribe, and comment. See you next week. Thank you.