How much equity you give up at each round
Carta's median dilution, raise and post-money valuation stage by stage, set against the ownership founders are measured still holding. The two diverge sharply, and that divergence is what catches founders out.
What the math predicts, and what Carta measures
The upper bar in each pair compounds the published round-dilution medians, which is the calculation most founders do. The lower bar is Carta's measurement of real cap tables at that stage. By Series A the prediction is almost double the reality.
Compounded figures are this site's arithmetic on the medians in the cards below, shown so you can check it. Measured figures are collective founding-team ownership, fully diluted, from the Carta, Founder Ownership Report 2026. Series B is published as an AI and non-AI split rather than one median; the bar plots the lower end. Model your own path in the multi-round calculator.
Pre-seed
No priced-round median exists, because pre-seed is almost entirely unpriced: 93% of pre-seed rounds in Q2 2026 were SAFEs. The dilution is real but deferred, and it lands all at once when those SAFEs convert at your first priced round.
Seed
Carta reports seed dilution has been ticking down for months. Option pool top-ups sit on top of this figure, and so does any SAFE converting into the round.
Series A
Carta calls this the lowest Series A dilution at any point in the last few years. For comparison, the median Series A in Q1 2025 ran 17.9%, down from 20.9% a year before that.
Series B
Dilution per round drops from Series A onward: the pre-money is far larger, so a bigger cheque buys a smaller slice, and pool top-ups shrink.
Series C
Carta publishes Series C as selling less than 10% of the company on median, rather than as a point figure, so treat 10% as a ceiling and not an average.
Series D
Late capital is the least dilutive per dollar, but by this point founder leverage over terms, board composition and structure matters more than the percentage.
Carta, VC startup fundraising benchmarks, published 10 July 2026: more than 1,000 software rounds closed in the six months to July 2026, excluding bridges and extensions. Valuations are post-money, as published.
Three rounds at 18%, 18% and 12% leaves you at 59%, not 52%
Founders new to fundraising tend to track dilution additively: 18 + 18 + 12 = 48, so they expect to keep 52%. The math is multiplicative, and on these numbers it is kinder than that: 0.82 x 0.82 x 0.88 = 0.592, or about 59% kept. Subtracting percentages overstates the damage, because each round only takes a share of what is already left.
The catch is that compounding understates it instead, and by much more. Carta measures the median founding team at 21.8% to 27.3% on raising a Series B, not the 59% this chain predicts. Getting the compounding right still leaves you wrong by a factor of two, because round dilution is only one of the four things taking your equity.