Seed
Typical seed dilution is 18-22%. A $3M check at $15M pre-money gets you to $18M post and the investor owns 17%. Add a 12% option pool refresh and founder dilution jumps to ~26%. Watch the pool size carefully — it's the silent dilution.
The full distribution
Seed post-money valuations vary widely. Median is $24M but the P25-P75 range spans $14M to $35M — a 2.5x spread between the bottom-quartile and top-quartile deal. For founders, this means there's genuine room to negotiate up if your story is strong; the median is just the middle, not a ceiling.
Check size and option pool
Seed round checks typically range $1M to $6M. Option pool refresh is typically 10-15% of post-money. The option pool comes out of pre-money allocation, not post-money — so a 15% pool refresh on a $$15M pre-money is essentially $$2.3M of founder dilution that doesn't fund anything operational.
AI-labelled seed rounds in 2026 transact at +35% over non-AI deals at the same stage. AI Seed pre-money median is approximately $20M vs $15M for non-AI. If you're non-AI, strip AI deals out of your comparable benchmarks before using a comp-based valuation method — otherwise the inflated comp set will produce an unrealistic anchor that VCs will reject. See the AI premium deep-dive.
Source
↗ https://carta.com/data/state-of-private-markets-q4-2025/Source: Carta Q4 2025 + PitchBook-NVCA Q1 2026 · Verified 2026-06-03.