What Makes Pre-Seed Investing in the US Different
Pre-seed in the US runs almost entirely on SAFEs, not priced equity. That's not a preference, it's the market standard: post-money SAFEs with a valuation cap and no discount are the default instrument, and that shapes how fast a round can close and how much lawyering it takes to get there.
It's also a smaller, more concentrated pool of money than it looks from the headlines. US-based startups raised $10.4 billion across 50,316 SAFEs and convertible notes in 2025, according to Carta, which tracks a large share of US cap tables. Total cash was down only 1% from 2024, but the number of instruments issued fell 13%. Read those two numbers together and the story is clear: roughly the same amount of money went into fewer deals, which means the average check got bigger and the bar to get one got higher.
Valuation caps moved with it. Carta's 2025 data put typical post-money SAFE caps around $10 million for rounds between $250,000 and $1 million, and around $15 million for rounds between $1 million and $2.5 million. Angel checks in the US still mostly fall in the $25,000 to $500,000 range, and the dilution math on a $500,000 SAFE against a $10 million cap works out to about 5% before any later conversion mechanics kick in. VC checks proper run much larger, from $2 million up past $100 million, but very little of that shows up at pre-seed; the VC money you'll actually meet at this stage usually comes through a firm's seed or micro-VC arm writing a smaller first check, not the full-size fund.
What this means for you: don't treat pre-seed as a numbers game where more emails wins. With capital concentrating into fewer checks, a tightly targeted list of investors who actually write at this stage beats a long list of names pulled from a general "VC" search. That's the whole point of filtering an investor database down to pre-seed specifically instead of starting from a generic list and hoping.
Where Pre-Seed Investors Are Based in the US
Geography is lopsided. Close to two out of every five pre-seed investors in the AngelMatch database are based in California, and roughly one in five are in New York. After that comes a second tier, Massachusetts, Texas, Florida, Washington, and Illinois, each holding a low single-digit share of the national total. It's a long tail after those seven: pre-seed money is present in nearly every state, just thin outside the coasts.
Cities tell the same story at a finer grain. San Francisco alone accounts for roughly one in five pre-seed investors nationally, and New York City for close to one in six. Los Angeles, Boston, Seattle, and Austin each hold a real but much smaller slice, and the Bay Area suburbs, Palo Alto and Menlo Park among them, add meaningful depth right around San Francisco rather than a separate hub. Chicago and Miami round out the group of cities with a genuine concentration of pre-seed checks, not just a handful of names.
None of that means you have to be in San Francisco to raise. It means you should expect your fastest yeses to come from warm introductions in California or New York, and build the rest of your list from wherever your actual network and customer base already are. A founder in San Francisco or New York City genuinely has more local density to lean on for coffee meetings and demo days. A founder somewhere in the long tail, and there are pre-seed checks written in almost every state, should lean harder on remote intros and treat any nearby cluster, Austin, Denver, Chicago, as a first stop before widening the search nationally.
It's worth separating two different things that get lumped together as "location": where an investor is based, and where they're willing to invest. Plenty of San Francisco and New York investors write checks into founders they've never met in person, especially post-2020, so being outside a hub costs you local density, not access. What it doesn't excuse is skipping the research. A founder in Ohio or Georgia who treats every investor the same, regardless of whether that investor has ever funded a company outside the coasts, wastes meetings on people who were never going to say yes to a remote pitch in the first place.
What US Pre-Seed Investors Are Funding
Generalist software categories dominate the tags on our pre-seed investor base. More than half list information technology or B2B as an area of interest, just under half list enterprise software or consumer internet, and two in five list fintech. That's not surprising at pre-seed: most investors at this stage back the team and the market opportunity more than a specific vertical, and software is still the default bet because it's cheap to build a first version and fast to get a signal.
But the money itself is moving in a slightly different direction than the interest tags suggest. Carta's 2025 review found that while SaaS remained the largest pre-seed industry by dollars raised, hardware and biotech and pharma finished the year as the second and third largest categories by cash invested, up from third and fifth the year before. Founders building in atoms rather than pure software are pulling in real pre-seed dollars, often bigger checks per round because the capital needs are higher and the proof points take longer to hit.
The practical read for you: if you're building a generalist software product, you're competing in the most crowded lane in the country, so a sharp, specific wedge matters more than ever. If you're building something hardware-, health-, or deep-tech-adjacent, don't assume you need to raise less because "pre-seed rounds are small." Investors who do fund atoms-heavy startups are underwriting bigger checks and longer timelines from day one, and your ask should reflect the real cost of getting to your first proof point, not a generic pre-seed number you saw in a blog post. A quick pass through a fintech-focused investor list, or the equivalent for your category, will tell you fast whether the checks in your space run bigger than the generalist norm.
Fintech sits in an interesting middle spot in this data. Two in five US pre-seed investors list it as an interest, high enough that it's not a niche category, but the space also comes with more regulatory overhead than a plain B2B tool, which tends to filter out investors who aren't genuinely comfortable underwriting that risk. If you're raising a fintech pre-seed round, expect more diligence questions about licensing and compliance timelines than a founder pitching a generic workflow tool would face, and have those answers ready before the first meeting rather than scrambling for them in a follow-up email.
How to Approach a Pre-Seed Investor in the US
Dilution at this stage typically runs 15% to 25%, whether you're closing on a SAFE with a cap or negotiating a small priced round. Know that range before you set a valuation cap, because a founder who hasn't done the math tends to either give away too much on the first check or ask for a cap so high that experienced investors pass without saying why.
Timing matters more than most founders expect. Many US investors go quiet over July and August, and again for a few weeks around the winter holidays, so a raise that starts in mid-June or early December often stalls through no fault of the pitch. Build a buffer into your plan rather than assuming every week on your calendar is a normal fundraising week.
Before you set a target number, get a real read on your runway. A raise that's sized to "what other pre-seed startups get" instead of what your actual burn requires is one of the more common ways founders end up back on the fundraising trail six months earlier than planned. Do the math on your current burn before you start pitching, so you walk into the room with a number you can defend instead of a guess.
Once you have a target and a list, the work becomes volume and follow-up: first touches, second touches, the investors who go quiet and need a nudge two weeks later. That's where most pre-seed rounds are actually won or lost, not in the pitch itself but in whether you kept every conversation moving at the same time instead of letting the strong ones go cold while you chased a weak one.
Founders who raise pre-seed in the United States are competing for attention from a pool of investors that got more selective in 2025, not less, even as the total dollars stayed roughly flat. Sharpen your list to the states, cities, and categories where the checks are actually being written, size your ask to your real runway, and give yourself room for the slow months. Keep every conversation in one place with a fundraising CRM so a promising reply from a California or New York investor never gets buried under the ones that went nowhere.
Pre-seed investors
